Even though the term was not quite fashionable at the time, I wasn’t too surprised, as I had already gone through so much within our family. Mischievously, I asked cheekily, “Well, are you sure about that?”
“I am leaning toward that,” you replied sheepishly. I guess you felt you had said too much and you were embarrassed about using that word. It doesn’t look too bad when men do that. Looks a bit immature, but somehow reassuring.
When I went back to work after that first weekend, the little foxes at the girl’s school smelled something. They kept commenting that I looked different or something. Ah, really. You asked me a few times, but I really didn’t feel anything special toward you at the beginning. Just friendly. I don’t know why, but I just could not wait to tell you about my father and discuss all the issues with you.
I went back the following weekend. You had already turned that storage house into a living space, you also did the floor for my work space. I was so uneasy about my decision to move in.
I remember us going to the village to buy pots and pans and food, and having dinner across from each other. How could I tell you about my father without becoming truly intimate with you? I remember a friend at school once saying, don’t share a meal with any man, you become intimate when you eat together. Remember at the beginning how we slept far apart from each other, with the two fleece blankets borrowed from the owners of the house? We lay there like that, our backs turned to each other, and talked until late, unable to sleep. I think I began to mention my father after a few days.
When I was in elementary school, we lived in Seoul and moved around a lot. My mother was the sole breadwinner, and we could afford to buy a house only years later. Jung Hee was too young to go to school, so whenever my mother was out I made breakfast and woke my father, since he always went to bed drunk. Since we moved around so much I went to many different schools. One day at a new school, my teacher told me to go to the principal’s office. There was a stranger waiting for me.
“You’re Han Yoon Hee?”
Then he said my father’s name and asked if that was my father. When I said yes, he asked if I knew our address, and I said no I didn’t. The principal told me, “Go pack your book bag and come back here. You can leave early today.”
I was afraid that something had happened at home, and I was scared of the man in the leather jacket with piercing eyes. As I walked home, the man followed me. As we walked together, the man asked me questions.
“Do any men come to your house?”
“No.”
“Does your mom still sell clothes at the market?”
“Yes.”
“What does your father do?”
“He just stays home.”
“What does he do at home?”
“Nothing.”
“You have a radio at home?”
“Yes, we do.”
“How many? Do you have a really small one?”
“We only have one.”
“Who gives your father money for drinks?”
“Mom does before she goes to work in the morning.”
When we got home, on that particular day, my father was sober. He saw me coming home unusually early, and the man who was following me, and got angry.
“I told you I’d contact you! You went to my kid’s school? Do you really have to do this?”
“My bosses want a report and I couldn’t get in touch with you. What’s the use getting mad at me?”
My father left with the man and came back late that night. He was even more drunk than usual and could not walk straight. I heard my parents screaming and fighting, and though I couldn’t hear the full details I found out that the man was a detective and that my father had to report to him whenever we moved.
When he was sober, my father always read books. He collected paperbacks in Japanese and English from used bookstores. We were proud of him because he knew so much more than we did, though we didn’t like that he drank too much. He was never affected by hot or cold weather. In winter, he never wore long johns, always just a pair of pants. During the hottest days of summer, he sat quietly in his room all day, cross-legged and slowly fanning himself. He always sat straight and upright, and once he settled down he did not move. His feet were grotesque and ugly. There were only three toes on his right foot, and his left foot was missing its little toe. Plus both his ankle bones protruded like a hard rock. When we were little, Jung Hee and I used to pinch and scratch the hardened calluses on his anklebones and giggle.
When I told you about my father’s feet, you calmly interrupted me. You said his feet looked like that because he spent years in prison during difficult times. That we would know why if we spent one winter on a cold cement floor.
There were so many anti-Communist rallies and events. At school we were constantly assigned to design an anti-Communist poster, write an essay about crushing communism, or prepare an anti-Communist speech for a contest. I was in seventh grade when I was painting a poster as homework. Since elementary school I had always been praised for my artwork, but I never received any serious training. My mother was against it. Only in my senior year in high school was I sent to a drawing class for a few months to learn how to draw and prepare for a college entrance exam. Anyway, I was doing this homework, and at that age I was mostly familiar with comic books, so I did a picture like something from a comic book. On top I wrote in red ‘Crush the Commies!’ There were three adults, a muscular soldier and two civilians—a man and a woman. Arm in arm, they trampled on a red monster with horns and canine teeth and hair all over his body. For a while I was concentrating on painting the monster’s entire body in red, so I did not realize how long my father had been looking at my picture from behind me.
“What are you doing, Yoon Hee?”
I replied proudly.
“Our homework is to make an anti-Communist poster.”
“I see . . . so who is that monster with horns down there?”
“This is a Communist.”
“He’s really grotesque.”
“Because he is a Communist.”
At the time, he did not say anything more. But later, it all blew up. My painting was selected as one of ten the school sent to the national competition, and I won a prize. I received a letter of commendation with gilded decorations and as a prize a sketchbook and an expensive set of watercolors in many different shades. As I entered our courtyard I saw my father sitting on the porch, so I shouted in delight, “Father, I got an award!”
He was drunk, and when he saw the letter of commendation, his hands began to tremble. At once, he tore it in two. Then in four, then into many little pieces. He threw them away, scattering them all over the courtyard, and threw away the sketchbook and watercolors too. The sketchbook flew across the courtyard, landed in a water basin, and quickly sank while the watercolors were scattered all over the courtyard. Speechless with shock, I collapsed onto the ground and cried.
“What, you think you did the right thing? You think that the Northerners are not our people? Award? For what?”
I was so hurt and embarrassed by his drunken frenzy that I just went to my bedroom and cried under the covers. My mother probably heard what had happened from Jung Hee when she came home. But instead of shouting and getting angry at my drunk father, she was unusually silent that night. I felt betrayed by her.
I finally became aware of his past, little by little, when I was in high school. My mother told me one story after another, as if she was unwinding a long skein of thread. I knew that my father had had a tough time and faced many dangers during the Korean War, but I just assumed that he was “on our side.” Ah, but my father was that hideous, scary, red guerilla. From then on, I could never forgive him. He was the root of all our problems.
I was a senior in high school the first time I defied my father. Finally my mother had bought a store of her own in the marketplace and a small gabled house for us to live in. We wanted a more stable life. After school on certain days of the week, I went to an ar
t studio to practice my drawing instead of going home. On those days I got home after nine at night. My mother was always late, usually coming home past eleven after closing the store, so either Jung Hee or I cooked dinner, whoever was home first. Normally Jung Hee had dinner ready when I came back from the art studio, but that night she was late as well and just had a bowl of ramen for her own dinner. I was starving but decided to cook some rice for my mother, who would come home later, and my father, who had not returned home yet. I was washing the rice by the faucet in the courtyard when my father came back. He was completely drunk, as usual, and stumbling. Looking at my staggering father, I felt sad and annoyed and angry. I glared at him while I stayed seated in front of the water. He stumbled and stopped in front of me.
“What is this, you’re making dinner now? There are two grown-up girls here, and dinner is not ready?”
If he had just passed me by and gone into his room, if he had fallen asleep turned toward the wall and scrunched like a shrimp as he usually did, then I would have made sure he had his blankets and a glass of water to drink when he woke up. I slowly got up and faced him.
“Since when were you so worried about this family that you’re now concerned about dinner? All you need is alcohol, you don’t care about us.”
He stood there, his face vacant. I could not stop myself.
“Have you ever done a decent thing in your life? Have you ever acted like a head of our family that we could be proud of? We want our mom to stay home like everyone else’s moms. I’m not asking for a father I could boast about to other people, I just want a father who works hard for his family.”
My father slowly sank down and sat on the porch, his shoes still on. He looked at me, silent. I had finally managed to spit out the words that always lingered in my mouth but that I had been unable to speak before.
“All you can give us is the label that we’re children of a Commie, is there anything else?”
Then he walked slowly toward me without stumbling, without saying a word. He slapped me once, on my face. His shoulders were trembling as he walked to his room. He went in and closed the door quietly. Maybe he went to sleep, the room remained dark. I wept silently, not because my cheek hurt or I was ashamed to be slapped, but because I felt guilty that I had done something unforgivable to my own father. The next morning, I went to the door of my parents’ bedroom and whispered, “I’m going to school.”
My mother was still in a deep sleep, exhausted. The sliding door opened quietly.
“Yoon Hee, come closer.”
Through the slightly opened door I saw my father’s long and thin face. As if he was trying hard to smile, he crinkled his eyes with dark circles and looked at me. He handed over a slender book.
“I went to Kwanghwamoon yesterday . . . I bought this for you.”
Once in a while, my father went to a foreign bookstore in the Kwanghwamoon neighborhood to look around and sometimes he came home with a book or a magazine. What he gave me was a Japanese paperback. It is now one of my most cherished books. A book on Goya’s etchings. That world full of scary, extraordinary disasters and pain. You can feel the hand of an absolute master. As I received the book, I became more embarrassed by what had happened the night before.
“Father, I am so sorry about last night.”
“I know. Hurry, go to school.”
A few days later, I heard from my mom why he was so extremely drunk that night. After the Revitalizing Reforms of October 1972, the Law for Society’s Safety was introduced. Under this new law, anyone who once infringed on the Anti-Communism Law was to be reinvestigated, some of them imprisoned depending on the outcome. My father needed a sponsor. I guess it could have been a lot worse. All his life, my father lived in disgrace because of the old scars he carried. I found out much later, when I spent many hours nursing him, that he had already “converted” years ago, that he had denied his belief in communism and socialism and had pledged loyalty to the government of South Korea. He was alive thanks to my mother’s family. When he was captured in the mountains and sent to a detention camp in Namwon, my mother’s oldest brother took action and made sure that my father received a more favorable classification. Thanks to that, my father received a five-year sentence instead of being executed without trial. My uncle was a lawyer when he passed away, but he passed the bar exam during the Japanese occupation and was a prosecutor of political offenders after the liberation. My father hated seeing his powerful, eminent brother-in-law, but my mom frequently went to his house for a sobbing session. I remember going to my uncle’s house with her when I was little. While she knelt in front of her screaming and scolding brother in the library, I would snack on sweet rice cakes or red bean jellies that my aunt brought out.
Ah, I can picture that day, my father meeting my mother at the market and together going to my uncle’s law office to beg for clemency. I can imagine my father’s return home. After sending my mom back to the market, he walks down the busy, unheeding street in the middle of the day, in the world where no one believes in his future. On the grand avenues full of government buildings, where the whole street would freeze during the daily ceremony of lowering the national flag, my father tries to breathe and wander around the dark corridors of foreign bookstores and used bookstores. And he buys the book on Goya for me, feeling the same way he did when he first saw the Goyas in Tokyo as a young man from a colony. Those black-and-white images are like fearful groans issuing from war and oppression.
I will write later about our reconciliation, the year I was able to go back to his past. I already told you I was with him from the moment we found out about his incurable condition to the moment he died.
Now that I think about it, I was waiting for you. Maybe I blamed myself. When I was young I did not try to understand my father, and when I grew up and became a college student I did nothing about the military dictatorship. I read as much as I could about the other side. Then one day, you appeared. I remember the day we first kissed. It was one spring day, on a weekend, when you finished remodeling our room and my studio.
6
I closed Yoon Hee’s notebook and lay down for a bit. Most of the stories about her father I already knew because I had heard them from her. Yoon Hee talked about her family whenever she had a chance. I could picture her father even better than Yoon Hee, like adding light and shadow and background to a drawing with only thick lines.
When I became involved in the organization in the late seventies, it did not happen by accident. The summer Nam Soo left for Seoul, I was invited to a certain gathering. Around that time, several Christian groups were actively working all over the country, and this gathering was for both Christians and non-Christians active in various fields, from the labor movement to factory night schools to street protests, to share information and encourage each other. Most people involved in the youth and labor movements had started while they were students, and many had been to prison already. In reality, the gathering was pretty harmless. People presented field cases that were already well-known throughout the country, and we would debate in groups about current events and just get to know each other and socialize. After dinner I left the building to smoke a cigarette, and a man approached me. He was short, with a square head and sparkling eyes, a young man of my age.
“I wanted to introduce myself. My name is Choi Dong Woo.”
“I’m Oh Hyun Woo.”
“Ah, I know you well.”
“How . . . ?”
“You went to prison during the October Struggle. You were one of the first to oppose the Reforms in ’72, right? I was in the same class with Park Suk Joon.”
“Wow, I see. So glad to meet you. What are you doing now?”
“After the military, I went to work at a factory in Inchon. But I’m going to quit soon.”
That was how I met Choi Dong Woo. We didn’t say much more there, but I did mention the small village where I was teaching and found out Dong Woo was born and raised there. He said his eldest uncle still lived ther
e. After the gathering was over, we automatically walked home together. He spent two nights in the house I was renting in the countryside. Something he said on one of those nights deeply reverberated with me.
“Don’t you think that our history post-liberation is just like the game of stacking up Korean chess pieces? You start with a couple, then more, and you think you’ve finished building this tower. But there’s this irresistible force that slams the board, and the chess pieces fall like a sand castle. On top of ashes and bloody ruins we start building again, one by one. We all know the ultimate limitation, but instead of overcoming it we just keep building and collapsing and building and collapsing, again and again. What do you think that ultimate limitation is? It could be something you can see, something tangible, or it could be a metaphysical concept. It is the division of our country and foreign influence.”
We returned to the question we used to debate endlessly, the question of radical versus popular politics. I was still hesitant. I remembered how I wasn’t able to say anything when Nam Soo said he wanted to be a real fighter. After he left, I met Nam Soo several times in Seoul. He was much calmer than he’d been before. Once I met him in a park, and he was carrying a huge bundle. We went to a big mansion where a young couple lived and spent the whole night talking, just the two of us. He was in the middle of an operation. The organization he belonged to had begun a new project in different parts of the city, and Nam Soo was in charge of the western section, distributing leaflets on each university campus. Earlier that day he had studied his routes around that part of the city. From his bundle he brought out a roller and a mimeograph. He put them into another bag. He said they were trying hard to get a more efficient printer. I told him that I knew a missionary who might be able to locate one for them. Nam Soo whispered to me, “I am just going crazy inside because I’m so nervous. We all started at different points, but we’re all walking the same road, so there isn’t that much conflict. When you go up a mountain, there’s a little path, there’s a wide road, then there’s a steep path covered with thorns. You’ll only find out which one is the right path when you’re standing at the summit.”
The Old Garden Page 8
