The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Before I could leave, I was taken to the same room where I’d been brought when I transferred there, was given a body inspection, and changed from my blue prisoner’s uniform to the gray uniform of transferred prisoners. I was made to wear rubber shoes with the heels sawn off. They put handcuffs on me, tied my arms, and then bound my upper arms to my body. The end of the rope extended from my back like a leash, which was held by a guard. I wasn’t even to dream of eating on the outside, as we had lunch before setting out. That was the first time I saw my guards wearing civilian clothes. They looked like friendly neighbors in their suits and jackets without insignias, their heads bare of caps.

  A jeep waited for us with its engine running. I sat in the back with one guard while the other sat next to the driver. It felt like a miracle when the jeep drove through the open gate. The guard next to me unwrapped a stick of gum and popped it in his mouth, then unwrapped another and held it out in front of my mouth, and I snapped it up.

  We crossed a bridge. It was the rainy season and the river was brown with sludge, threatening to overflow the embankment. The day was overcast but dry. I stared closely at the cars of unfamiliar shapes and at the people inside. No one looked back at me. The passengers sat side by side, talking, laughing, or simply gazing ahead without expression.

  The jeep parked a hundred meters away from the hospital. The guard in the front wound the lead rope around his fist, and we set out. I wondered how I looked to others, being led around by two men in civilian clothes. They must have thought I was a violent criminal. I saw the glass doors of the hospital in the distance. A woman came out of a shop holding the hand of a small child. The child was whining, but when we passed them in the street, the child’s face went from puckered to awed. The woman was also staring. The heelless soles of my shoes made a slapping sound on the ground. I had to take small steps to keep them from coming off. The child tugged at his mother’s hand and asked:

  —Mom, who is that man?

  The woman didn’t answer but instead gripped the child’s hand tighter and pulled him away. I couldn’t help but turn to look. I saw them both standing in the street, staring at me. I tried to smile at the child, but the woman quickly turned and pulled the child along after her.

  Inside the hospital was a reception area with sofas and chairs. One of the guards went to see the doctor I had an appointment with, and the other guard sat me down on one of the sofas. There were all sorts of people waiting there, none of whom would look at me. They were trying to act casual, but I could tell they were making an effort not to meet my eye. They all had the same look on their faces. No one sat down next to us. Two teenage girls entered, giggling over something. I happened to be looking in their direction. They walked toward the sofa, absorbed in their conversation. It was only when they noticed me that they stopped in their tracks and exchanged a look.

  I kept telling myself that all I’d done was resist the immoral power of the government. I was no sinner. Nor was I an outcast. I’d simply rejected what was offered and walked out on my own two feet. But there were no tags on my uniform, not even one saying I was prisoner 1306. I was denied anything that would identify me as an individual. I had been erased.

  It was a depressing outing. Even if I were to be released, I was always going to remain a prisoner in some form unless the outside world changed. I now knew what society thought of me.

  The poet Lee Si-young, of Changbi Publishers, was more of a brother than a literary colleague in the way he took care of me while I was in prison. As I have mentioned, he went to jail for publishing my North Korea travelogue, written during exile in Germany, in the Quarterly Changbi. You would think he’d resent me for it, but he came to see me in prison once every two months as soon as he was released. He pitied my boredom, since I’d been prevented from writing during my imprisonment, and suggested I try my hand at translating The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Our generation studied Chinese characters in primary school the way students in the West once mastered Latin, and our college textbooks regularly mixed Chinese characters with Korean letters. I had also taken private lessons from Hong Jin-pyo in preparation for writing Jang Gil-san, which made me think I could take on the task of translating from classical Chinese.

  I asked if he could get me a copy of the Jeongeumsa Press edition of Romance, which was the version I had read as a child in the 1950s. He had it sent to me. I thought it would be interesting work to compare different translations and better pass the time in my cell, the perfect task for prison.

  I asked Inspector Lee, of the political prisoners’ management office, if it would be possible. I wouldn’t be writing creative work that required going through the Ministry of Justice censors, and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms was a classic that Koreans of all ages enjoyed. It would reduce some of the tedium of my sentence and help me improve my classical Chinese and writing chops. I wanted to write something. I bought several dictionaries of both Korean and classical Chinese, and read the edition of Romance that was popular at the end of the Joseon Dynasty and throughout the Japanese occupation. It helped me revive my reading comprehension of classical Chinese that had grown rusty since my Jang Gil-san days. Another edition, sent by Choi Won-suk, happened to be the source text used in all subsequent Korean editions of Romance, and so I used it as my own source. The first sentence goes: “It has been known for generations that what has been divided shall be united, and what has been united shall be divided.”

  I slowly translated two volumes in prison, eventually finishing the entire task some five years after my release. Inspector Lee Ju-hee had the carpentry inmates fashion a low desk and legless chair for me, and provided notebooks, pens, and colored pencils. The Ministry of Justice was able to tell the outside world that I was “being allowed to write,” and while that was a compromise for me, I didn’t complain. The prison, when they heard I wanted to translate, was happy to move me to a quieter cell.

  My new cell was in the block for remand prisoners. Between the inner and outer walls of the prison, where no convicted inmates were allowed, were the prison offices, workers’ cafeteria, meeting rooms, and two detainee cell blocks. These blocks housed those who weren’t technically criminals, as their cases were still being tried, and yet were not free, either. The second floor was completely empty. This meant there were fewer prisoners still on trial than there was room for them in the prison. My room was in the middle of the second floor and was normally occupied by seven or eight inmates. It was twice the size of the private cells I was used to; best of all, it had a south-facing window that enabled me to see beyond the prison gates, all the way to the city and mountains and forests. I was all alone on the second floor, and no one came to do checks in the mornings and evenings.

  I missed cultivating the vegetable patch and exercising with the younger inmates like I used to, so I did those things with the soji assigned to me, instead. My soji there was a former car dealer who’d accidentally killed someone while drunk at the wheel; his sentence was nearly at an end. His nickname, because of his tippling, was Strawberry Nose. He vowed to me again and again that he would never touch a drop after he was released. His repeated assurances made me suspect that he really, really wanted that drink. We created a vegetable plot by the wall in the backyard. Just like before, we planted lettuce, kale, mugwort, and chili, using seeds and seedlings provided to us by the guards. My exercise with the young inmates was replaced with badminton in the yard with Strawberry Nose, using a set provided by the inspector.

  I began to see my old cell block with new eyes whenever I happened to visit. I finally read the slogans plastered on the walls, which my eyes had blurred over before. I even read them out loud. “You don’t know life if you haven’t cried into your bread.” “Lead, don’t be led.” “What have I done for my family today?” “Mother, your son is being reborn.”

  I once went over to the halfway house to cook stew with the soji when the stove in my cell block’s hallway was put away for the summer. The halfway house was a real h
ouse, with a kitchen and four rooms and no bars on the windows. No one was staying there at that time. We quietly entered through the front door and cooked our stew using an electric heater placed over the sink. I looked around the rooms. The walls were black with writing. There were the dates and names and comments of people being released. The words crowded the walls at eye level. What were these traces of their souls they had wished to leave behind? “Dear Sook, tomorrow I go to you.” “Thirteen years of bloody tears.” “My dead father, your son is finally going home.” “That bastard guard Park Il-dong, you’re my sworn enemy until the day I die.” “Oh, my youth that has passed me by.” “Young ones, obey the law.” “This place is a trash can of humanity.” “Money ruins lives.”

  Like in the old tales where there’s a river or chamber of oblivion between this world and the next, a space where we lose all of our memories of the life before; or like the midway points in the ocean where deep-sea divers must linger before surfacing if they want to avoid decompression sickness, regular prisoners spend two to four days in this place before they are set free. It is already halfway outside the prison walls, which means your body as well as your mind is halfway out of captivity. During those few days, the prisoner must forget all that has happened in prison and prepare to connect their past to their future. It may seem strange to them, however, having accomplished this task, to find that the world continued to go its way while the prisoner himself was in prison.

  The outside world was in turmoil with the upcoming presidential elections in December. Kim Dae-jung had come out of retirement and returned from exile overseas to declare his candidacy. A campaign for my release was still going on in the midst of election fever. Just as pardons were being discussed for former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, in prison for high treason, writers and intellectuals who were petitioning for my release cited the need to “obtain justice for those imprisoned for resisting Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, whose crimes have been confirmed and are about to be pardoned by the law.”

  The day of the election, December 18, was warm for early winter. The prison did not provide televisions, but we could listen to the radio in the evenings—especially when there were major sports events, which they let us listen to late into the night. I believe they broadcast the election night results as well. My cell block was allowed newspaper subscriptions but had no broadcast facilities. Even so, I was meeting with family or my lawyer almost every day at that point and was bound to be updated on any important developments.

  I’d heard that the opposition party candidate was favored to win. I couldn’t sleep on election night, knowing that my remaining time in prison would be determined by whoever won. Around midnight, I heard a roar go up in the other cell blocks, just like when the Korean national soccer team scored an away goal. They had all been listening to the radio. It made me jump out of bed. The guard on duty downstairs ran up to my cell and shouted joyfully to me:

  —Kim Dae-jung has won! Sir, you’re going to leave this place soon!

  On Christmas Eve, political prisoners across the country embarked on a hunger strike to protest the Christmas presidential pardoning of Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo. Normally the doors would be opened during exercise hour, allowing me to meet up with the student prisoners in the other cell blocks during hunger strikes. But that day, the guard came up to the floor where I was held alone and stayed there until evening, without once opening my cell door.

  I learned what had happened at the Gongju Correctional Institution only later, when I read about it in the newspaper. My fellow writers had arrived at the prison as a group to publicly proclaim a “Protest for the Freedom of Hwang Sok-yong,” aimed at the government and President-Elect Kim Dae-jung. Fifty writers had come to visit me from Seoul, Gwangju, and Daejeon, only to be prevented by the prison authorities, whereupon they staged a protest instead.

  The writers went on to participate in “prison allowance solidarity,” where they paid the 30,000 won daily quota for prison allowance transfers. They decided to contribute a 500-won coin each so that everyone could have a hand in it, with some even giving extra 100-won coins to max out the quota. At 4 p.m. the smiling writers waved goodbye to the twenty or so guards blocking their way at the prison gates and climbed aboard the bus for Seoul. This bus, according to Lee Soon-won with his usual writerly eloquence, was “meant to take Hwang Sok-yong back to Seoul with us,” the newspapers quoted him as saying. “The light was as bright as the sun shining on a country elder’s birthday banquet, but the walls of the prison were still too high.”

  We finally entered the new year, and I received some New Year’s cards, including a letter from Yeom Mu-ung in Daegu:

  It’s 1998 already. How fast time flies. It’s as if I am not living my life on my own time but being dragged around by a time outside of myself. I feel this is the case more and more every day.

  During the events of the end of last year, I thought of where you were, that very place I spent six years of my middle and high school life. I also thought of the dawn climbs during the winter at Suyuri twenty-five years ago.

  How is your health? Now that you are in your midfifties—how awful the thought, one’s midfifties!—you must be feeling it in your bones. I’ve had diabetes for the past ten years and feel that I have less strength with each passing day. I feel a helplessness, as if I was being pushed down a mountain by a power beyond my control. All this, however, must seem trivial to you where you are.

  I am sure that I will meet you in the outside world before spring. The past five years will be a springboard for creative life in the coming years.

  Please take care of yourself.

  They say that gwishim, the desire to return home, is as keen and swift as an arrow, but instead time wore on and spring dragged its feet. Finally, on March 13, 1998, Kim Dae-jung issued a presidential pardon on my behalf.

  Normally I should have been let out after midnight, but it took some time for the paperwork to come down from the Ministry of Justice to the regional prisons. Inspector Lee had been transferred to another prison and there was only Inspector Park, with whom I had not gotten along since the beginning of my sentence. He was the one who handed me the changes of clothes and shoes that I’d been sent from outside.

  I peeled off my prisoner’s uniform. First went what inmates jokingly called the “People’s Army” jacket, padded with cotton like the Korean War–era Chinese soldiers, then the trousers that were held up by a string as thick as my finger. I took off the thermal long johns with their now stretched-out knees and stood in my undershirt and underpants, feeling untouched by the cold of early spring. I put on the shirt, the suit, and lastly the shoes. Inspector Park, who was standing nearby, chuckled and said I was fit to be a model.

  I retrieved my things from prison storage: a photo of my mother taken before she died, one of Ho-seop sent from America, photos of Ho-jun and Yeo-jeong from when they were small, and my faded brown leather wallet. I had visited the storeroom before, to change my blankets every season, and I knew very well where my things were lying in wait. There, in lockers with perforated doors, labeled with each prisoner’s number, were objects that held the traces of their incarcerated owners. There were pairs of shoes that had trod unfamiliar streets and alleys, smeared with their dirt, the heels worn on one side. A faded laborer’s jumpsuit with a makgeolli stain, an eyeglass case, tattered summer clothes now no better than rags, mesh-top slippers that were trendy some summer past, thicksoled hiking boots, all sorts of hats, rings, necklaces, watches, and other baubles—all the objects that had disappeared from life the moment their owners were arrested, tied up in string like the old memories of people long dead.

  Inspector Park handed me my release notice and informed me that I was technically on parole and needed to report to the nearest police station within a week of my homecoming. He shook my hand.

  —Congratulations on your release. I hope you become a fine, upstanding member of society.

  He saluted me, and I bowed in res
ponse. I was a little surprised at how his gesture washed away the resentment I’d felt toward him. We walked to the prison gate together and stopped in front of the small side door next to the guard post.

  —All right, then. Beyond here is where the world starts. Have a good life.

  I nodded and walked through the gate.

  Friends and scores of reporters were waiting outside. Standing by the gate, my eldest son, Ho-jun, and daughter, Yeo-jeong, were the first to greet me. I told the reporters:

  —It feels as if I have now completed the long journey that began in Gwangju in 1980.

  The reporters returned to Seoul on their chartered bus, and I left in a car provided by my in-laws. Light snow began to fall. By the time we reached the highway, the spring snow was coming down so heavily that it was accumulating on the edges of the windows. As the car sped down the highway my ears began to go numb, and soon everything sounded very far away. As if I were alone in the mountains, with the sounds of the city coming to me from somewhere deep in the valley. I felt no sense of speed. My body, having lived in a private cell for so long, was trying to protect itself. My years in prison already seemed like a distant memory. It was like that feeling at dawn when you’re not quite over the previous night’s drinking.