The Old Garden

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  Yoon Hee’s note ended there. The last letter among the ones my sister gave me was dated the summer of 1996. I remember her last sentence.

  You in there, me out here, that’s how we spent a lifetime. There were difficult times, but let us make peace with all our days. Goodbye, my darling.

  It took me a few years in solitary confinement to realize, painfully, what our era had meant once it was over. Our various attempts to take control of the government had become outdated or unnecessary. The antiestablishment ideas that were formulated from within the system of capitalism and materialism were distorted during the process of realization. Instead, like a skeletal steel frame still standing among the ruins, a few remaining propositions are more important than ever. In any society, the most lively legacy of the last few hundred years is the defense of democratic principles and the return of sovereignty to the people. They are like the handful of belongings saved from a burnt-down house. There should be a continuous challenge to authority for change and reform, and groups of ordinary people should form an alliance to reclaim what was taken by the state inch by inch, like a children’s game, and enlarge the territory to the level of practical equality.

  One summer’s day, I went out to the exercise field and found a commotion everywhere on television, on the radio, and in the newspapers. In the middle-class neighborhood south of the Han River, which has prospered since the seventies, a bridge and a department store had collapsed one after the other. Around that time, the government appeared to have changed to a civilian one, but it was in essence only a controlled transition from military dictatorship at the conclusion of more than thirty years of modernization. For days there were accounts of people who died, or who somehow persevered under fallen concrete and dirt until they were rescued. The media blasted the owner of the department store, who had illegally altered the structure, continued to operate the business despite warning signs, and made no attempt to evacuate the customers until the very last minute. Then various stories about his past came out. Apparently, he had been an agent for the Japanese during the occupation. The details of his activities were not clear, but he evidently became an officer at the Japanese consulate in Manchuria. After the liberation, he came back to Korea and worked for the American occupiers, and during the Korean War he became an interrogator of Chinese POWs. Fluent in Chinese and knowledgeable about anti-Japanese activities in Manchuria, he was considered one of South Korea’s top experts. He was involved in forming the South Korean intelligence agency, served as an intermediary to the American army, and managed to win the bid on the choicest parcels of land where the American army depot used to be. He became a real estate mogul, building apartment buildings and department stores. Everything was detailed in the newspapers. In the South, the era of government-controlled development and modernization was coming to an end, while starvation and a mass exodus had begun in the North. It was the beginning of the last chapter in this divided land. The chaos and changes could go on for a long time on a much larger scale. Would there be anything else left for me to do? If so, it would be a struggle in everyday life.

  In prison, I had a habit of living in the future, getting ahead in days in order to erase them. At the beginning of each month I crossed out the whole month on the calendar, and on New Year’s Day I drew a circle around the new year. But the present dragged on so slowly. The news of the changing world outside quietly soaked in from time to time, like the season’s passing shown by dandelion seeds or the yellowed leaves of a willow tree floating in through the iron bars. The news might arrive late, but we knew very well what good and evil had transpired in the outside world before the year was gone.

  We must return to the revolution of June 1987 that was so long anticipated, yet ended up being cursed for years to come. Everyone had been hopeful, but then they lost their hope, and, despondent, we splintered into too many fragments. The laborers, the farmers, the students, the intelligentsia, the religious, the poor, the unemployed. The list was endless, and we even had to add the white-collar workers to it. Still we did not find ourselves, not realizing that the true birth of citizenship would occur only when we all got together.

  It has been less than a month since I was released from prison, and the whole country is going through a serious economic crisis. All I had were a few pairs of underwear that I’d brought with me from solitary confinement, and I could not imagine what it meant to be poor. The little sparrows sitting on the wire might fly away at once when others approach, and when they come back they try to reorganize in the mist of confusion. Those who do not quickly participate in this momentary reorganization fly away, and are scattered all over the place. Maybe I am not alone.

  The sixth morning in Kalmae arrived.

  I packed my bag, and I included Yoon Hee’s notebooks. I made breakfast, and I washed the dishes and mopped the floor, like I used to in my solitary cell. Before I left the house I looked at the portrait of two people whose paths had crossed. I do not look at my younger self, but at Yoon Hee, the older mother standing behind me gazing beyond my shoulder,.

  When I close my eyes, I see the flowers of seasons that are now gone.

  Walking on the ridge between the vegetable fields, the cold morning dew soaking my ankles, I spot the pale pink flowers of bindweed peeking through green leaves here and there. A thistle is shaking in the wind with its numerous prickles that look like fur. Pampas grasses are swaying on top of the hill with the blue sky in the background. With a whoosh, one magpie flies through tree branches, while a pair sits on a gently swinging branch with their tails touching once in a while. Just one step away from the bindweed flower is the tip of her white rubber shoe, and I see her long fingers plucking the thistle. She is walking through the pampas grasses. Her shirt and the hem of her skirt appear then disappear among the white plumes. The magpies are sitting on the branch of a persimmon tree, and Yoon Hee is leaning against its trunk. Suddenly, it is dark and prison bars are draped in front of my eyes. Above the white wall encircled with barbed wires, a searchlight brightly illuminates the night, and beyond the wall is a persimmon tree guarding the road. At first she does not appear, but soon Yoon Hee is there, standing under the tree. Someone stands by the bathroom window and sings the same song over and over again. He is out of tune and making up the lyrics as he goes along, but he continues to sing quietly and cautiously, taking a short break once in a while. Look, it’s snowing! The rhythmic sound of footsteps walking down the corridor. I open my eyes, and the black-and-white pictures disappear.

  Did you find that place? Yoon Hee asks me. I will answer that I am on my way back home. That I have climbed the mountains and hills to look for the house. That I started to see the village lights and smoke coming out of a chimney far away. That I started walking, swaggering, following the road you traveled before. I stand on the side where she is looking out from behind my young face, and I murmur, “I’ll come back.”

  Like a man leaving the house he grew up in, I looked around once more, and then I left the house. I said goodbye to the Soonchun lady, her youngest son, and his wife. I walked down the narrow road through the orchard to get a taxicab by the bridge, and I left Kalmae, as I had returned to it.

  Eun Gyul is wearing her school uniform, a tartan skirt and a short-sleeved shirt. Her long hair is parted in the middle, and it rolls up slightly at the end, just like her mother’s did. When I push open the glass door and walk into the bakery, she politely stands up from her chair and waits for me to approach. I remember Han Jung Hee’s concerns, and I try not to show my emotions.

  “What was my father like?” she says.

  “Did you like your mom?” I ask.

  We speak almost at the same time. We smile, followed by a moment of awkward silence. Like a good child, Eun Gyul makes the concession and answers first.

  “I liked her but I could not understand her.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She only cared about one thing.”

  “Just one thing?”

  Eu
n Gyul averts her eyes and pauses, as if she is choosing her words carefully, “You must know people who are like that. An avid collector, or someone who always takes the same road . . . Like possessed, or something like that.”

  “That doesn’t sound like the person I knew. Maybe she loved the world in a different way than you do.”

  “There were times when I was younger when I did not like her, but I grew up to like her in the end. And now, you have to give me an answer, too.”

  “What was your question . . . ?”

  “My father. You were with him in the United States, weren’t you?”

  “To borrow your words, he was also someone who cared about only one thing.”

  Again, she acts like a good child and declares, “I guess it’s not such a bad thing to be passionate about something.”

  Eun Gyul and I find seats on a bench in a park. She and I watch little children run around and play in a sandy playground with a slide and swings. An old man is pushing a little girl on a swing. As he pushes her with a bit of force, the swing goes up high and the little girl shakes her tiny legs and giggles with delight. There is the creaking sound of iron chains. We sit side by side and eat cotton candy. I fumble with my tongue through the soft texture of spun sugar, which keeps sticking to my lips. I take out a handkerchief and wipe the pink stain from Eun Gyul’s cheeks. She has already figured out that I am her father.

  “When I was younger, I wished I had a father who would play with me like that.”

  “Weren’t you close to your mom?”

  “It’s not that we didn’t want to be, but . . . how should I say it, our timing was off.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I just played by myself. And she spent time by herself, too. And it became harder to spend time together, and if we went somewhere together for a special occasion, like to an amusement park, it was too tiring for both of us because we were both too considerate toward each other.”

  “Why was that?”

  “We were both frustrated and then felt sorry for each other, so we tried to overcompensate, and then we both realized what the other one was doing, and we repeated it again and again.”

  Eun Gyul answers her cell phone, and hesitating, she gets up.

  “I have to go now. I hope we’ll see each other often, Dad.”

  In a flash, all these scenes disappear. Outside the bus window, the earth in springtime passes by. Blooming forsythias cover the hill, and the field is dyed light green with brand new sprouts.

  I go to the place where we decided to meet over the phone. She will be there with her aunt. It is a café in a busy area overlooking a square with a fountain. It happens to be the lunch hour, and people who work in nearby buildings are taking a break, sitting on benches and steps. At one corner of the square, a brass band is playing “The Blue Danube,” and water is sprouting from the fountain. I stand on the sidewalk to look for the meeting place, and when I see the crowd sitting on the marble steps in front of the building I sigh. Out of the blue, I am drenched in cold sweat and my legs are unsteady, like the day I left the university hospital. I try to calm down by leaning against a marble column, hiding from the people going up and down the stairs. I walk around the column to go down the steps, and Yoon Hee is standing at the bottom of the stairway. I cannot tell if she is wearing white or the palest blue, but there is a faint smile on her face as she watches me. I stagger down toward her. I knock into people climbing up, I shake them off with both hands, and I move my feet quickly, flustered. I could see her but now she is gone, maybe she has been swallowed by the crowd. Would it be possible to rewind the film and repeat the trace of her that was just here? I take out a handkerchief to wipe my face, and I inhale and exhale a couple of times to steady my breathing. Across the street I see the sign for the café and its French doors.

  And fly from?

  Everyone

  And bound for where?

  For nowhere

  Do you know what time they have spent together?

  A short time

  And when they will veer asunder?

  Soon22

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “More has been expected of Hwang Sok-yong than almost any other Korean writer of the past quarter century. Ever since the early 1970s, when Hwang began to write stories about the nameless millions on whose backs the Korean ‘economic miracle’ was realized, he has been regarded as a champion of the people,” writes Bruce Fulton in The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature. Indeed, Hwang Sok-yong has witnessed many of the tumultuous events of modern Korean history and drawn artistic inspiration from his own experiences as vagabond day laborer, student activist, Vietnam War veteran, advocate for coal miners and garment workers, and political dissident. The works of Hwang Sok-yong have consistently reflected the trials and tribulations of Korea’s modern history.

  Hwang Sok-yong was born in 1943 in Zhangchung, Manchuria, where his family found refuge after the Japanese occupation of Korea. When Korea was liberated in 1945, they returned to Hwanghae province in what is now North Korea, then moved again to an industrial suburb of Seoul in 1949, just before the start of the Korean War. In July 1953, an armistice was signed that definitively divided the country into two states, a division that still haunts the national psyche.

  Mr. Hwang debuted as a writer in 1962 while still a student at Gyeongbok High School when his short story “Ipseokbugen” (Near the Marking Stone) won the Promising Young Writer Award sponsored by the journal Sasanggye (Intellect).

  In 1966, Mr. Hwang was drafted into Korea’s military corps in Vietnam, and reluctantly fought until 1969 for the American cause, which he saw as an attack on the Vietnamese liberation struggle:What difference was there between my father’s generation, drafted into the Japanese army or made to service Imperial Japan’s pan-Asian ambitions, and my own, unloaded into Vietnam by the Americans in order to establish a “Pax Americana” zone in the Far East during the Cold War?

  In Vietnam, he was responsible for “cleanup,” erasing the proof of civilian massacres and burying the dead. Based on these experiences, he wrote the 1970 short story “The Pagoda,” which won the Korean daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo’s New Year prize.

  His novella, The Chronicle of a Man Named Han, the story of a family separated by the Korean War, was also published in 1970, and is still relevant today as tensions between North and South Korea have forced some separated families to travel to a third country to see long-lost relatives.

  Mr. Hwang published a collection of stories, The Road to Sampo, in 1974, then became a household name with his epic Chang Kil-san, which was serialized in a daily newspaper over a period of ten years (1974-84). Using the parable of a bandit from olden times (“parables are the only way to foil the censors”) to describe the contemporary dictatorship, Chang Kil-san was a huge success in both North and South Korea. It sold an estimated million copies, and remains a bestseller in Korean fiction today.

  Hwang Sok-yong also wrote for the theater, and several members of a company were killed for performing one of his plays during the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, a bloody confrontation between pro-democracy supporters and Republic of Korea Army General Chun Doo Hwan’s dictatorship. During this time, Hwang Sok-yong went from being just a writer revered by students and intellectuals to becoming a political activist.

  In 1985, he published a substantial and award-winning novel based on his bitter experience of the Vietnam War, The Shadow of Arms. It was translated into English in 1994 and into French in 2003.

  In 1989, Mr. Hwang travelled to Pyongyang in North Korea as a representative of the nascent democratic movement:When I went to North Korea I realized that writers from the North had read poems and novels by progressive writers from the South. The main reason for my visit was to promote exchange between the Association of South Korean Artists and the General Federation of North Korean Literature and Arts Unions. I suggested starting a magazine that would feature works of Northern as well as Southern writers. That was how th
e Literature of the Reunification magazine was born, and how many works from Southern novelists and poets were introduced to the North.

  This border crossing was a violation of South Korean national security law, so Hwang Sok-yong was forced to live in exile in New York, later in Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  In 1993, he returned to Seoul—because “a writer needs to live in the country of his mother tongue”—and was promptly sentenced to seven years in prison for breach of national security. While in prison, he conducted eighteen hunger strikes against restrictions such as the banning of pens and inadequate nutrition. Organizations around the world, including PEN America and Amnesty International, rallied for his release, and he was finally pardoned in 1998 as part of a group amnesty by the then-newly elected president Kim Dae-jung.

  After his release, Hwang Sok-yong published his first novel in ten years, The Old Garden, in 2000. The story of two lovers separated when one is sentenced to eighteen years in prison for his political activities in the Kwangju Uprising has been highly successful and won the Danjae Award and the Yi San Literary Award. In 2005, it was published in German by DTV, and in French by Zulma. The English-language edition will be published in September 2009 by Seven Stories Press, and subsequently in the UK by Picador Asia.

  The Guest, a novel about a massacre in North Korea wrongly attributed to the Americans, which was in fact a battle between Christian and Communist Koreans, was published in 2001. The “guest” is a euphemism in Korean for smallpox, or an unwanted visitor that brings death and destruction, and it is used in the novel to describe the twin horrors that Christianity and Communism became when introduced to Korea. The English-language edition was published in 2005 by Seven Stories Press.