A second.
The leftist fell.
A third.
The leftist squirmed.
A fourth.
The leftist lay unmoving.
The leftist’s wife, standing stock still,
shed not a tear.
The previous night
she’d been dragged out
and raped by four men.
She shed not a tear.
Old Shin
Let’s be off!
Let’s be off!
Old Shin, a refugee,
wanted to go back to the home he had left:
216, Sanjeong-ri, Jaseong-myeon, Gujang-gun, North Pyeongan province.
Half senile and
half insane
he wanted to go back to the home he had left.
Let’s be off!
Let’s be off!
His son came back, drunk.
Once again he’d had no luck finding a job.
Let’s be off!
Let’s be off!
His son suddenly shouted:
‘You old fool, there’s nowhere to go. Drop dead!’
Other Clouds
The living were ashamed before the dead.
The dead were ashamed before the living.
No trains arrived at the station.
The first summer and fall of the war went by.
Winter went by.
The following spring
Yun Do-jun, having survived it all, became a simpleton.
Escaping
bombing
killing
revenge killing
escaping again.
Yun Do-jun, having survived all that,
could not help but become a simpleton.
When children called out: ‘Mister Do-jun!’
his eyes were blank.
When children teased him with, ‘Hey, Do-jun!’
or with, ‘You, Do-jun!’
his eyes were blank.
One child suddenly lost his temper:
‘Why didn’t this idiot die, why’s he still alive?
Not fair! My uncle, he died.’
Homecoming
His father’s last words:
Your brother’s surely still alive.
I feel so sad I am dying without seeing him again.
When your brother comes back,
tell him that.
Later
His mother’s last words:
Your brother’s coming over the hills;
hurry up and bring him back.
After Liberation, their long-absent son stood before their graves.
He shed a lot of tears after 29 years.
The anarchist Jeong Hwa-am’s homecoming
was a shabby affair.
In socialist society as in capitalist society,
an anarchist must be an object of misunderstanding,
shabbier than a shadow.
Pagoda Park
In Pagoda Park stands the stone pagoda of Wongak Temple
which looks sometimes like an ice sculpture.
It was noisy around that ice sculpture
after the second recapture of Seoul:
a home for the homeless,
a workplace for those with no work.
From mid-morning on
people would gather one by one around the pagoda.
After five in the afternoon
they left one by one.
There was a man
who made a fervent speech there,
holding an old fan,
when about one hundred
or perhaps only twenty had gathered.
He talked about Dangun, our country’s founder,
General Im Gyeong-eop,
Kim Jong-seo and
and Han Myeong-hui, politicians in days of old, too.
He looked haggard.
His eyes were not clear and he had wrinkles like a mud-flat.
He said,
‘A hundred years from now,
our country will be the centre of the world.
Fifty years from now,
our country will be the top nation of the East.
In future our nation
Kim Dong-bok
never missed a day.
After making a passionate speech for about two hours,
if someone bought him a bowl of noodles
he would gulp down all the broth in a moment,
and then say,
‘In future, Korea
will be the presiding country of
the World Presidents’ Association.
Wait and see.
Wait and see.
Ah, those noodles were tasteless.’
He misspoke. He meant to say ‘tasty’.
He looked around
old panama hats,
felt hats,
helmets,
straw hats,
military caps,
and
bare heads, crew-cuts.
Middle School Classmates
Korea was a battlefield, everywhere.
The battlefront
moved south down the peninsula.
Then the battlefront
shifted north up the peninsula.
The battlefront
left not one place untouched,
rummaged everywhere,
trashed every corner.
Moreover, the battle was not only on the front.
In the rear
between one and another,
there was hatred
deceit,
plunder.
Before, under Japanese rule, foolish people were friends together.
But here on this battlefield
even foolish people turned into one another’s enemies.
Yeom Gi-uk informed on Baek U-jong,
saying that he met the younger brother of Kim Chin-gu
who’d gone north after Liberation.
But Kim Chin-gu had already died in the Bodoyeonmaeng*
and his younger brother had gone north, so he’d never met him.
Yeom was Baek’s middle-school classmate
but Baek once refused a request Yeom made
so Baek U-jong was denounced.
False or not
if you denounced someone as a spy, you got a reward.
All the guys you disliked were spies.
* After Liberation in 1945 and before the Korean War the South government tried to convert communist sympathisers; the organisation composed of such people was called the Bodoyeonmaeng (the Bodo League) and most of them were killed by the police of the Southern government when the South Korean forces were retreating for the second time on January 4, 1951; that was when Koreans began killing each other indiscriminately.
Kim Jin-se
His comrades were arrested.
He slipped away to Tianjin, in China,
to a Chinese slum –
the independence fighter Kim Gyu-sik,
together with his wife Kim Sun-ae,
and their son Kim Jin-se.
Neither father
nor mother
taught Korean to their son, born in 1928.
It would mean the end, if ever
a Korean word popped out
while he was playing with Chinese kids.
Agents of the Japanese army
had ears even in the Chinese slums.
Kim Jin-se only learned Korean after he turned thirty.
He learned some very clumsy Korean
from his countrymen in the Korean Provisional Government
in Shanghai,
in Chongqing.
He spoke Chinese far better.
Chwiwonjang in Northern Manchuria
You had to leave in order to live.
A division of the Japanese army in northern Korea crossed the Tumen River
on an operation designed to annihilate the Koreans
to the north of the T
umen River
and north of the Yalu.
In revenge for the great defeat at Cheongsan-ri
the Japanese planned an operation with three slogans:
Kill on sight!
Burn on sight!
Rob on sight!
The Koreans in western Manchuria
fled northward,
northward,
to the end of maize fields, millet fields,
northward to the end of the sky.
Following the Songhua River for a hundred ri
beyond Harbin,
they fled to the far end of the open plains of North Manchuria,
and there, at the far end of those open plains,
there,
they unloaded,
made dugout shelters, settled down.
Seokju’s first words:
The waters of this Songhua River flow all the way
from Korea’s Paektu Mountain…
They decided to make it the second base for the Independence Movement
and mulled over ways to live.
Brothers were warm-hearted toward each other
in their life of exile.
Yi Sang-ryong
and his younger brother
Yi Bong-hui
shared warm affection and
strong convictions.
There, in Chwiwonjang,
the birch-wood fire in the kitchen
never went out
throughout several bitter winter months.
That Year’s Paper Korean Flags
Japan surrendered at midday on 15 August 1945.
Called an unconditional surrender,
it was conditional,
for the emperor stayed in place.
From that day
paper Taegeukgis fluttered across the Korean peninsula.
They fluttered there, sometimes just with a yin-yang symbol
and the four divination signs added
to the red circle of a Japanese flag.
On 20 August 1945,
a declaration was issued by the Soviet Army:
We, the Red Army, grant all the conditions
needed for the Korean people
to begin to live with freedom and creativity.
The Korean people themselves
should create their own happiness.
On 2 September 1945
General Order No. 1 was issued from the headquarters of America’s MacArthur:
All Korean people must immediately obey all orders
issued under my authority.
All acts of resistance to the occupying forces
and disturbances of public peace
will be severely punished.
Taegeukgis that had been hidden since March 1919 were fluttering everywhere.
Taegeukgis that had been buried until August 1945 were fluttering again.
However, the Americans were not a liberation army
but an occupying army.
Paper Taegeukgis were fluttering for them.
Chin Mu-gil of Yongdun village, Miryong-ri, Mi-myeon, Okku-gun, North Jeolla
was good at painting Taegeukgis on paper.
He drew fifty a day.
He even took some over the hill to Okjeong-ri.
He sent some to Mijei village, too.
On 6 October 1945
an American jeep appeared in Yongdun village.
The villagers welcomed the big-nosed soldiers
carrying Taegeukgis in their hands.
Who knew that the soldiers would start hunting women?
All the village’s pigtailed young women
hid in fireholes,
crept under the floors,
hid in bamboo groves,
but they were dragged from their hiding places
up the hill behind the village.
In Hamgyeong province in northern Korea, too,
it’s said that Soviet troops robbed people of their watches
and hunted for women.
Jin Mu-gil’s cousin in Okjeong-ri, a tall girl,
locked herself in her room
and huddled all night in the closet, a cripple, a hunchback.
Exoduses
In January 1911
having lost their nation,
the people left, fleeing from the Japanese:
the first exodus.
In 1912
more people left, fleeing from the Japanese:
the second exodus.
In the summer of 1913
more people left, fleeing from the Japanese:
the third exodus.
And a fourth exodus, fifth, sixth…
during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931,
even during the Pacific War in 1942.
They left
with one pot,
one blanket,
and a sick child on their backs.
Farmers who for centuries had never once thought of leaving
left.
Tomorrow, when they hope to regain their country,
and today, with its starvation, embraced one other,
and they were hopeless on the long mountain ridges
while the sun set.
Amidst such processions
a boy was growing up
who would later throw a bomb
at the Japanese emperor.
Revering Yi Bong-chang
who was executed after throwing a bomb at the Japanese emperor,
he changed his name from Nam Ji-su to Nam Bong-chang,
made a bomb, and was caught in the act.
A Scene
A little boat was floating on the sea off Byeonsan.
During the war
sun-bronzed Gang Dong-su
put out to sea
to draw his father’s spirit out of water.
Bailing out the boat,
Father
Father
Father, come on out.
In the summer of 1950
Gang Byeon-hwan, a guard at the office of the People’s Committee
in Buan, North Jeolla province,
was thrown into the sea with all the other red collaborators
as the communists retreated northward.
Father, father, don’t be afraid, come on out quickly.
That Child
By the sea in Asan,
South Chungcheong province,
rose a hill that looked about to collapse,
a hill
that had thawed after freezing.
Ah, that child,
Kim Tae-seop,
left all alone and
always crying.
A boy in his early teens
with his head completely shaved
passed by some clumps of goosefoot.
Following him
was one hollow-bellied goat.
Not a boat was in sight on the evening sea.
Not a tree on the hills.
His parents, reds, had been arrested and had died.
Their only child
was sent to his maternal uncle’s house.
He grew up working in the paddies
and in the fields.
Today
he has walked a long way
and is gazing at the sea.
Of father,
of mother,
no sign.
Chi-sun
The Soejeongji field,
the Bawipaegi field,
the Galmoe field,
the Jaechongji field,
then over the hill, the Bangattal field,
the Bangjuk field.
Work was unending throughout the year.
First daughter, Chi-sun was adept at housekeeping,
a good worker.
Drawing water at daybreak,
cooking,
pounding the mortar,
boiling cattle feed,
carrying food to the field-workers,
sweeping the yard,
removing the as
hes,
catching insects in the kitchen garden,
doing laundry,
weaving straw sacks on rainy days,
patching old clothes by lamplight
in the evenings.
She had no time to catch a cold,
no darkness in which to look up at stars.
She wasn’t born to be a person,
she was born just to be a labourer.
One wish
lay in her heart:
never to marry
into a household with a lot of work.
Then, thanks to a matchmaker, she married
a son of the miller, of all people.
From early morning,
together with one errand-girl,
she measured out the weight of rice
in the dust-filled mill
and in the evenings
kept watch over the watermelon and melon patches.
She wasn’t married as a person
but as a labourer.
Her husband was an invalid,
a consumptive.
She had to prepare drinking tables
for her father-in-law
three or four times a day.
Worn out after such a life, she watched
her husband, his health improving,
take a concubine, a new labourer.
Yi Jong-nak