Authors: Ko Un
The father, Shin Gil-ho was 51,
the son, Shin Haeng-bok, 26.
The father had six convictions for larceny,
the son had four convictions for larceny.
In prison, a convict who is penniless is known as
dog hair
,
while one who cashes promissory notes
or cheques is called
tiger hair
.
Dog-hair
father and son
were assigned to different cells,
but after supper,
with difficulty, they communicated
through a little barred window in the back.
From the father’s third theft
the son
had followed in his father’s footsteps.
What they said:
Did you eat enough?
Yes, Dad.
Rub the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet a lot.
And don’t skip rubdowns with a cold towel.
Yes, all right, son.
The father, with his shining, prematurely bald head,
murmured to himself:
My boy, I know nothing else about him,
but he’s the most filial son in the country.
Moving secretly through many parts of China,
he devoted himself to the independence movement in his fatherland.
Along with his devotion and tenacity, he was cautious,
so he survived and came back home.
Even back home, prison was his politics.
His fatherland,
the Korean peninsula
where the sea on three sides can never be calm,
was always the land he dreamed of.
He passed fifty,
sixty,
seventy.
With reality so bleak, even dreaming was hard.
He rejected all honors.
Belief was his only politics.
Even a 40-watt light in a dreary cell
was an utterly vain dream to him
each day when he awoke.
He was no reality, he was a legend.
As if modern history were ancient history,
Jeong Hwa-am endured, white-haired.
I have three surnames.
In this land
where changing surnames is one of the greatest humiliations,
I have three or four surnames.
In Japan there is a surname Gui,
meaning ghost,
often therefore changed into the wife’s family name.
My case has nothing to do with such customs.
However, my family name can be Kim,
or Nam
or sometimes Jang.
Yet I am no swindler.
Not content with those names, anyway,
I adopt my mother’s surname Ko
and am sometimes called Ko.
Once I got dreadfully drunk
and fell into an old-style latrine,
after which I was Bun,
meaning Shit.
Until the 1970s, some eccentrics from the late Joseon period
continued to live with various names like this,
which meant that life was never boring.
My family name was Shit.
Jin Dal-ho
was a man with plans, great or shaky,
who sold his lands in Jeong-eup in North Jeolla
and came up to Seoul.
Though born to the fields,
his body as a whole
was in good shape,
no need for a carpenter to ply his inked cord.
His lips were always fresh,
and when he washed up in the morning
he never gave a damn about others in the queue.
He washed his neck,
behind his ears, beneath his ears,
the ridge of his nose,
even his chest beneath his undervest, two or three times.
He soaped for a long time,
and rinsed off the foam for a long time, too.
Only then did he say: Now I feel alive, I can enjoy my food.
Yet day after day nothing worked out
and he stayed at the Dabok Inn as a long-term guest
for over a year.
His notebook held
the President’s phone number,
some National Assemblyman’s phone number,
even the switchboard at Midopa department store,
each compactly set down,
but day after day nothing worked out.
All he could manage was
to seduce the woman working at the inn
and make love to her at night.
In Yeongdong, North Chungcheong province,
nobody cared about the Yushin Reforms or anything else.
There was one man who took care of all the village’s unpleasant jobs
such as renting a room for gamblers,
laying out the body if someone died,
castrating a pig,
mating cows or horses.
That was No Bong-gu.
So poor that the roof of his house rotted into furrows,
but always warm-hearted
like the fire in a brazier.
In the winter when it was too cold to move,
and children walked with short, quick steps,
red-nosed,
he would shelter them from the wind, saying:
‘Ah, you must be cold!’
But he was so poor that finally his children were starving.
Somehow he got hold of three yards of rotten straw rope,
tied it to a tree
and hanged himself.
Or rather, pretended to hang himself,
not intending to die.
Once they got wind of that,
the villagers gathered grain
so he and his children could survive
the winter.
‘No, it would never do for him to die.
Who would do the hard work
in our village,
in the neighbouring villages,
if not No Bong-gu?’
The food was seasoned with deep-red pepper powder.
The red pepper that people began to eat
from the late Joseon period
is like something Koreans have eaten since ancient times.
You only have to take a bite,
ahh,
a fire kindles in the mouth.
The drinkers’ delight in 1960s and 70s Seoul
was to empty ten bottles of strong
soju
alongside such hot –
and salty – side-dishes,
when it was already eleven at night, nearly curfew time.
Why did they have to be so tough?
Around that time everything used to get exaggerated.
Even Park Jung-hee got exaggerated,
so that he shrank to bean-size.
If someone shouted
that brat Park Jung-hee,
that brat was even using his daughter as First Lady,
and so on,
that gave him authority
and the friends who had come with him would pay for the drinks.
One day I picked up a scrap of newspaper
off the cement floor of that kind of bar
and first learned about the self-immolation of the young worker Jeon Tae-il.
There were plenty of prisoners in Daegu prison with long or life terms.
One of the long-term prisoners
with a stiff white beard
looked out into the corridor
and questioned a green youth who had just come from trial.
‘What did you get?’
‘One year two months.’
‘Hell, call that a sentence?
That’s the time it takes a lifer to piss.
Hey, how can that be called a sentence?’
Jang Gwang-seop, with his one year two months,
was nicknamed Muhammad Ali.
Even when he got a thrashing from a guard,
he would brush himself off, stand up as if nothing had happened,
and calmly walk away.
This Ali Jang Gwang-seop
was one of the descendants of Jeong Mong-ju,
who stayed loyal to Goryeo to the bitter end
and wrote a last poem before he was killed.
The poem began:
‘Though I die
and die again a hundred times…’
Starting as an errand boy in Gyeongseong jail
long ago during the Japanese colonial period,
he became assistant guard,
then guard,
the lowest rank of prison officer,
for forty-seven years in all.
His work was tying the ropes
and fastening the handcuffs
of those going out for morning sessions,
for interrogations by the prosecution or for trial in court.
His pock-marked face was dark
and his eyes looked as though he had not eaten for three days.
His gold-rimmed hat
sat a little too heavily on him.
When convoy vehicles numbers one and two left early in the morning,
he went along as escort.
In the evenings, as a substitute guard,
he would go peeking into this cell and that,
and if the prisoners kindly offered him
fallen apples or
rice cakes they had bought,
he would take them without hesitation,
with not a word of thanks, saying:
‘This rice cake is made with wheat flour,
and coated with soy bean powder.’
For meals he made do with prison food.
When he went home, he did nothing but catch up on his sleep
because he always had triple shift overtime.
That’s why he told the prisoners:
‘No lifer has anything on me, you know.’
In winter it was like the outdoors.
He was the man with hair cut short
in charge of detention cells at Seodaemun police station in the 1970s.
He never got promoted.
Every time someone came in,
every time several came in,
surely they had some fault,
and he would find it,
would kick, kick hard,
to depress their spirits from the start.
Im Cheol-man.
But after meals
he would turn to the women’s cell
and demand a song.
If someone sang a song such as,
‘I will build a house like one in a picture,’
a storm of applause would pour
from the men’s cell.
Then it would be the turn of the men’s cell.
If someone jailed for a first burglary after three larcenies
sang ‘Camellia Girl’…
Im Cheol-man would scream:
‘You lout,
shame on you, you, a man, acting so pathetic.’
A perpetual guard,
he once said in prayerful tones:
‘Just one time
these cells
were completely empty
and I was really very bored.
‘Yet my wish
is to be in charge of completely empty cells
with nobody coming in.
Hey, you bastard in cell two,
can’t you just listen quietly to what I’m saying?
Bastard.’
Colette,
born in Lyons, France,
joined an active sisterhood.
Her younger sister first worked in Vietnam, now lives in Japan.
Colette came to Seoul decades ago.
Her Korean is fluent,
her stomach’s accustomed to Korean food.
Even without cheese,
this is her country.
How holy! How amazing!
to have arrived at such intense unity.
Her Korean name is No Jeong-hye.
Secretly, she contributed much to the Korean human rights movement,
starting with the National Democratic Students’ Federation incident,
or even before.
She circulated petitions,
collected donations,
hid people,
even promised to hide me.
Her heart’s a wide plain.
She made her nest in a Sillim-dong slum,
lived in great poverty.
She reckoned a bowl of instant noodles was a feast.
She alone is reason enough why there has to be religion.
No one noticed
how salty it had become,
that river
in Sorae, Gyeonggi Province.
Seo Pil-seok cannot see
that river.
Blind,
he lost his sight some time ago.
At high tide
when rising waters advance to the top of the bank,
his back aches.
He hurt his back long ago in the war,
wounded on the central front.
At low tide
his belly aches,
a problem from long working in that salt farm
where he ended up after discharge.
Later, he lost his sight.
First he had something like cataracts
and the things he saw grew hazier day by day,
until finally he could see nothing.
He thought he’d go mad in that merciless darkness.
Time seems to have been a serum even for that darkness.
He grew resigned,
life a fluttering tent
even for a sightless body.
Today, too,
high tide and low tide depend on the moon.
Old Seo Pil-seok is more a man of the moon
than a man
of the earth.