Authors: Young-ha Kim
Jo Jangyun and his comrades listened to Gwon Yongjun and could not believe their ears. Just getting the corn for free would make life a lot easier. If that was the case, there was no real need to lower the prices of other goods. Menem opened the door of a birdcage and poured water into a small Chinese porcelain dish. The parrot inside clucked in greeting to its owner. Jo Jangyun agreed. He promised that they would go immediately to the fields. When they had gone, Menem called the overseer and instructed him to distribute food once a week. The overseer quietly protested that he was being far too charitable. Menem relit his cigar, which had gone out. “We must increase output. And teaching them a lesson once will be enough. After all, we have to live together for the next four years.”
Menem’s father had been a vagabond from the Basque country. He spent his youth wandering around, taking up with a number of women along the way, and he became an officer in the French army under the rule of Napoleon III.
Napoleon III strove to re-create the glory of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, and he particularly wanted to achieve something great in military terms. As a result, the army of Napoleon III never had a moment’s rest. The same went for Menem’s father, George. Napoleon III, being the meddler he was, became involved in the various problems in the New World. When the American Civil War broke out, he supported the South and stood against Lincoln and the North. The feudal nature of the South’s cotton plantations were more suited to his temperament.
In Mexico, Benito Juárez had become the minister of justice and devoted himself to confiscating the idle lands owned by the Catholic Church and establishing a new civil law, a law that would apply equally to all citizens. The Church, landowners, and aristocracy banded together. Civil war erupted. After three years, when their defeat became certain, the conservatives requested the aid of Napoleon III. Flush with his recent conquest of Indochina, and hearing his Spanish wife, Eugénie, urge him to build a Latin American empire every time she opened her mouth, he was elated when the conservatives of Mexico came to him. He named Archduke Maximilian as his representative; the Mexican aristocrats begged Maximilian to become emperor of Mexico, and so he traveled across the Atlantic with the army of Napoleon III and landed at the port of Veracruz. Menem’s father, George, sailed with them.
As soon as he arrived in the Mexican capital, Maximilian forgot who had invited him. To be precise, he realized that the conservatives were not very popular with the citizenry. He unexpectedly declared his support for Juárez’s liberalist policies. The wrath of the betrayed conservatives rent the heavens. And yet Juárez had no love for him either.
These were trying times for Menem’s father George as well. The Mexican peasant fighters seemed to lurk everywhere. They would appear suddenly, attack the French troops, and vanish again like ghosts. The massive cannons that the French had brought from west of the Alps were of no use in such guerrilla warfare. George’s only goal was to stay alive, though he began to realize that this new nation of Mexico was a fine place for white people such as himself. Mexico welcomed Latino immigrants, so if he settled down, he could build a house like a fortress on a vast hacienda, work the Indio slaves, and live like a king. If he returned to France, he would have no other choice but to live out his life as a career soldier. Furthermore, Napoleon III was nearing the end of his fortune. Having at last grown weary of the antiwar sentiment in France, he decided to withdraw his troops. The final days of his puppet Maximilian were approaching.
Standing before his troops as they wearily retreated to the port of Veracruz, George delivered a speech: “We may retreat now, but this is because of the powerlessness of Maximilian and the Mexican aristocracy. Emperor Napoleon will not forget the New World. The day will surely come when the Tricolore will fly from Quebec to Panama. Soldiers, we are not defeated. Let us return with our heads held high.”
When he finished his speech the troops erupted in thunderous applause. Some of them were so excited that they began to sing
La Marseillaise.
That night, George calmly packed the gold ingots that had been kept in the regimental headquarters and quietly left. The money had been offered to France as war funds by the privileged classes of Mexico, so he felt no guilt about taking it. He made the sign of the cross and prayed a short prayer: “Lord, gold is too precious a metal to be used for killing people.” Do not the thieves of Mexico give thanks to the Blessed Mother every time they take their cut? He took off his uniform, buried it, and disguised himself as a Mexican. Wearing a poncho and a broad-brimmed sombrero, he returned to Mexico City, where he took a train to the Yucatán. He changed his name to Don Carlos Giorgio. With his Spanish name he bought a house in Mérida and then married a mestizo woman who was one-sixteenth Spanish, and she bore him a son. This son was Menem.
Giorgio first tried his hand at raising chicle before branching out into henequen also. The main ingredient of gum, chicle was a specialty of the Yucatán. He spent all of his days among his chicle trees, and one day before his sixtieth birthday, he was struck by a poison arrow shot by a disgruntled Mayan perched in a chicle tree, and died. As his mouth succumbed to paralysis, he called out to his son and made two dying wishes. First, Menem was not to give up the henequen hacienda, and second, he was to bury Giorgio in Nice, next to his first wife. The first request was relatively easy. He couldn’t have sold the hacienda even if he wanted to. But the request to bury his father in Nice was troublesome. What will become of the hacienda while I go all the way to Nice to dig a hole in the ground? Menem simply ignored the second request.
Instead of searching for Giorgio’s murderer, Menem drove off almost all of the Mayan Indios. In their place he hired the Koreans, who had just arrived in Mérida. The contract was for four years, and they came at a much cheaper price than the Indios. They also had no ill will toward him, so he wouldn’t have to worry about uprisings or revolts. Yet now that he had met them himself, he found that they had fierce eyes and were rebellious, contrary to what he had heard. They were also much larger than the Mayans. So Menem determined to compromise. Providing them with corn and tortillas would not hurt him badly. And he had absolutely no desire to be struck dead by a poison arrow shot by a serf. The golden age of haciendas was over. He was more interested in the world of politics. Juárez’s successor, Porfirio Díaz, who had shot Emperor Maximilian to death and ascended to power, was an ignorant and uncouth man. This former guerrilla had transformed himself into a pro-American dictator who supported the elite and the landowning class. It was Díaz who turned all the farmlands into haciendas, stealing property from the petty farmers and giving it to the great landowners. As a result, a single hacienda owned by the famed Teresa family in the state of Chihuahua was larger than Belgium and the Netherlands put together, and it took a full day by train to cross it. Ninety-nine percent of Mexico’s farmland became haciendas, and ninety-eight percent of the peasants were robbed of their lands. Of course, Menem had no complaint with the hacienda system itself. He was simply displeased that President Díaz and a few families controlled everything. How could they not hold democratic elections? If Díaz held elections, as he had publicly pledged that he would, Menem had a mind to try his luck and run for governor of the Yucatán. Who knew how far he could go from that springboard, but at the very least he did not went to spend his entire life in this dusty wasteland.
T
WO MONTHS PASSED
. It was now July. The Koreans had changed greatly in appearance. Now almost none stuck themselves on the thorns of the henequen and bled. The women made leggings and gloves from pieces of cloth and sticks. The speed at which they worked also gradually increased, and after only two months they had caught up with the Mayans. They cut the henequen in silence. Laughter had disappeared. The women and children went out to the fields and worked twelve hours a day. There were suicides at a few of the haciendas. No one was surprised to see that someone had hanged himself from the crossbeam in a bathroom. The henequen juice got into their wounds and their flesh rotted from a skin disease; they caught malaria and hovered on the brink of death. No one batted an eye. Doctors were stationed at the plantations of Hawaii, if only as a formality, but at the haciendas there was not a single decent drugstore, let alone a doctor. In the Koreans’ minds, there was only one way to survive: to work like ants—even three-year-old children—save money like misers, and return to Korea when their contracts ended.
The Mayans occasionally gazed vacantly at the Koreans. They had no place to save money and return to. This was their home. One day, strange people barged in, drew lines in their land, and began to call those places haciendas. Then these people told the Mayans to come work for them if they wanted to make a living. The overseers lashed out ceaselessly with their whips at these people who could not find any reason to work.
When the day’s work ended, the men drank. Even though they had worked just as hard as the men, the women could not rest after going home. They lit the fires and cooked the food. They mended clothing, cleaned the house, and prepared the tools they would take with them the next day. “What I wouldn’t give to do laundry just once in a cold stream,” said a woman from Chungcheong province as she looked to the west, and the other women cried. Laundry was just as much of a luxury as bathing. The well was far away and water was scarce. They had no choice but to wait for the rainy season to begin.
Occasionally the hacendado would slaughter a cow or a pig, and the women would race to the spot and quarrel with each other over the still warm intestines or tail. The Mexicans of the hacienda snickered and called these women pek—bitches. With blood on their hands, the women returned with their spoils and boiled soup, and the children were so intoxicated by the smell of meat they would not leave the kettle’s side. Even on days above 90 degrees, the women could not take off their skirts or short jackets; their shirtless husbands drank and beat them. Some men had started gambling. Gambling and liquor were deep-rooted vices for Korean men and were not easily remedied. Bickering and crying, shrieking and yelling continued all night long. The Yucatán was hell for the men, but it was far worse for the women.
At Ijeong’s hacienda a Korean man from Pyeongan province violated a Mayan woman, and in retaliation his throat was slit. The police did not come. Directly after this, a Mayan man was stabbed to death with a machete. The hacendado seized the two Koreans whom the Mayans pointed out as the culprits, stripped off their shirts, threw them on a pile of henequen, and whipped them. The thorns on the henequen stems were more painful than the whip, and the two murderers writhed like worms on a pile of salt. When the whipping was over they were imprisoned in the hacienda’s jail. The henequen thorns lodged in their chests stung with every breath they took. They wanted to pull out the thorns, but no light came in, so it was not easy. Their wounds festered and vilely reeked. Only when ten days had passed did the door open and light shine in. Now that the jail was bright with dazzling tropical sunlight, they cleaned up their feces. The piles of dung were completely dry and crumbled like cookies to the touch. Worms wriggled and fell out of them.
The two murderers returned to their paja and lingered in illness. Ijeong, who shared the paja, gave them food and water, with kimchi made from chili peppers and Western cabbage on the side. It was a delectable feast, but neither of them could eat much. They wobbled with every step, as if they had lost their sense of direction and time during their dark imprisonment; one of them passed away after only three days. As soon as the one died, the other rose as if it had all been a dream. It was almost as if the two of them had made a bet and agreed that the loser would give his remaining life force to the winner and take his leave. As the survivor stuffed his swollen face with corn gruel, he said to Ijeong, “Somehow I feel as if I will meet my end here. It’s just too hot.”
Ijeong shut his mouth tight and said nothing. In the space of only a few days, two of the four men who had slept under his roof had died. Ijeong wondered if maybe he was alive merely because he was lucky. When the man from Pyeongan went to attack the Mayan woman, Ijeong had been next door playing chess with pieces carved from stone. When the man’s body was discovered, Ijeong had just gone to the cenote to draw water. The two enraged men did not look for Ijeong but went straight to where the Mayans lived, doggedly pursued a man who fled, and stabbed him to death. While the Mayan’s blood seeped into the ground, the two men stood in a daze and stared at each other. Only then did they realize the gravity of what they had done, and they raced back madly on weakened legs, were arrested by the hacienda guards, stripped of their clothes, and beaten on the pile of henequen.
The one who had survived was called Dolseok; he was the son of a government slave. After the Reform of 1894, this slave had risen in status to become a commoner and sent his son to Seoul to make him a soldier. Dolseok did not follow his father’s will, but boarded the
Ilford
at Jemulpo. He did not know how to write, so he had left without sending his father a letter. And within two months he had killed a man. “What on earth happened?” he said, shaking violently. It felt as if the Mayan men were going to rush in and take his head. Ijeong told him not to worry and tried to calm him down, but it was no use. The next day, Ijeong went to the overseer and pointed to the money in his pocket, then at himself, and then at Dolseok. Then he pointed at the Mayan village and made a slicing motion with his hand across his neck. He could not speak the language, but his meaning was understood. The Mexican overseer decided to sell them, a source of trouble, to another hacienda. Dolseok’s involvement in the murder would reduce their price, so it naturally remained a secret. They were bound hand and foot to a column on a carriage. The weather was unusually cool. From afar, Ijeong saw black storm clouds moving in. Finally it would rain. He stared at the sky to the east and fell into a deep sleep.