Intent on restoring Korea’s independence by all means,
he went into exile in Shanghai.
One day at dawn, Yi Jong-nak
woke from a dream where families back home
dressed in white were waving their hands.
After that he fell sick.
He went to a German hospital,
to a Japanese hospital.
He did not want to die
in a Japanese hospital,
so he moved to one in the French concession.
One day,
An Chang-ho visited him in hospital.
He told him to believe in Christianity.
Sick, Yi Jong-nak replied
that he could not believe in order to live;
once he got well he would believe with a sound mind.
One day
he said quietly to his comrade Jeong Hwa-am,
‘Hwa-am, I’m dying. Go on fighting for me as well.’
Clutching his comrade’s hand
he died.
He did nothing really to contribute to the independence movement,
not one act to speak of.
His forearms were so strong an awl could not pierce them.
He was good at the violin, good at sports,
good at singing at drinking parties.
Yi Jong-nak stood briefly on a small corner of his times, then went away.
The Lock-seller
Even a wooden shack had to have a lock.
Anyone who went to sleep leaving the front gate open was a fool.
Anyone who went to sleep without locking the door to his room was a fool.
Midsummer evenings,
while people were killing and being killed on the front,
in the rear thieves made their rounds by night.
Everyone had to have a padlock.
Safely locked in,
they had to hear in their dreams
the waves of the night sea.
A dusty wind was blowing in Gongdeok-dong in Seoul.
At the entrance to the alley
a seller of locks and keys
walked by, metal locks jangling from his clothes,
dressed in clothes heavy with clumps of iron.
Buy my keys!
Buy my locks!
Keys repaired. Locks repaired.
Buy my locks!
You can trust only to locks.
Buy my locks, buy my keys!
Two passing middle-school boys asked:
‘Hey, Mister!
What’s better, keyhole or key?’
The lock-seller laughed.
‘Hey kids, I don’t know,
go home and ask your parents.’
Yi Yohan the Orphan
Not one child was crying.
On the plaza in front of Busan station in 1952
there were children five-years-old,
six-years-old,
eight-years-old,
and some you could not tell:
five? six? eight?
Some bigger ones were eleven.
Some smaller ones were nine.
The children, wearing old woollen hats,
had been sent from Daegu, were headed
for Zion Orphanage at Songdo, Busan.
Gap-toothed children
deaf children
children with long trails of snot.
When they passed through tunnels
they were covered with coal smoke
in trains without windows
None was crying.
Crying was cowardly. Crying was shameful.
One of those children
was named Yi Yohan.
He had been given the family name of a pastor at a Daegu church.
His Christian name was that of John the Evangelist.
He knew nothing of his mother,
nothing of his father.
Later, this child
grew up to be one of the policemen who opened fire
to suppress the students protesting
in front of the Presidential Mansion
during the April Revolution in 1960.
Police sergeant Yi Yohan.
South Gate Street, Suwon
Soldiers,
gum sellers,
horse-carts,
ox-carts,
piles of droppings in the wake of the carts,
paper-boys,
combs, fine-toothed bamboo combs, glass beads, cheap necklaces,
urchin beggars,
American army trucks.
One old beggar lay prostrate all day long.
No sign of human pity anywhere.
The hungry grew hungrier.
The cold grew colder.
In Suwon’s South Gate Street,
Myeong-gu
had no shit inside him today as the day before. None.
He could get no food
anywhere round the city gate.
For three soju bottles, he could get a few crumbs of bread.
But here there was nothing like that in sight.
Only, only
the world.
Myeong-gu’s only thought was for a bowl of rice.
Hey, monks in mountains, what use are those koans you’re contemplating?
Cheonggye Stream
The clothes they were wearing were American-made,
trousers from relief supplies,
and dyed American military jackets –
but
in the university’s French department
students dreamed of themselves as Sartre,
Camus,
André Malraux.
America outside,
France inside.
Perhaps for that reason,
the long Cheonggye Stream
flowing through Seoul between Jong-no and Ulji-ro
was not Korea’s Hudson River
but Korea’s Seine.
There was the Café Seine in Myeong-dong, too.
The Seine was a place for washing clothes,
the Seine was a sewer
with melon-sized balls of shit floating down.
The Seine was a rubbish dump.
A little farther down the Seine
on the bank toward Gwansu-dong
was Division Four of Cheonggye Stream
where the shanty town began
and battles for survival were intense.
Girls working in clothing factories along Cheonggye Stream
lived in rented rooms in shanties.
The owners were kind-hearted by night,
full of abuse by day.
It was one month since Jo Ok-ja had come to Seoul
as a factory girl.
Every one of her fingers ached.
She worked all day at a sewing machine,
with nothing to eat but five small pieces of bread.
During overtime one night
she felt dizzy, collapsed.
She liked nights.
Sometimes, in her dreams,
she saw her mother.
Heukseok-dong
One dim bulb dangled from the ceiling
of the comic books reading-room.
The shoe store stank of leather.
Flies tended bar, no customers.
In the barbershop, honey soap.
Cheap bread stands.
In the mending shop, an old worn-out sewing machine.
All the way along, nothing but wooden shacks,
steep alleys barely wide enough for one
all the way along
There was a single water tap down below.
People lined up with empty water-cans
and a 10-hwan coin; once the cans were filled,
they carried them panting up the alley.
While people were living like this,
on the battlefront people died
and at the rear, people were born.
One woman gave birth two days ago,
and here she was out carrying water.
Her breasts hung
dangling from beneath her blouse.
She gave the child the name
of its father’s North Korean home.
Yu Seon-cheon.
Seon-cheon! Seon-cheon!
Our darling Seon-cheon!
A sliver moon rose early
to shine over this slum-village on a hill.
The Porter at Seoul Station
At 5 a.m. the night train from Busan arrived,
an hour after the end of curfew.
He had to be ready at the exit.
Soon the passengers debarked.
The haggling over porterage was brief.
One large suitcase,
one sack of grain,
one small case,
all loaded onto the A-frame,
while the owner followed behind.
He carried the load as far as the bus stop
across the road,
then demanded five hundred hwan,
saying the bag was far too heavy.
He refused to put the bag down, demanding payment.
Fingers wagged as they quarreled.
Finally the porter won
after reducing the charge
to four hundred hwan.
No need to be polite, no saying
Thanks or
Good bye.
The porter, Im Ho-sun,
had lost a son the day before.
Today he had come out
and made 400 hwan on his first load.
Once work was over at nightfall
he would down a shot of soju.
Only then would sorrow for his dead son
come welling up.
Until then
Seoul station spurned sorrow;
at the most extreme moments of life,
sorrow too is superfluous.
The 1920 Massacre
Even in the wilds of Manchuria, their place of exile,
the people from Korea
built schools in their villages.
Teaching their children
was the core of the Koreans’ life.
They built houses with floors of clay,
planted maize,
and barley.
After erecting four corner pillars of logs
they covered the roofs with stones packed close like moss
to keep them warm.
The buckwheat harvest was better than the barley.
Even scattered wildly
as if by a mad girl on a seesaw,
it’s tough, grows well.
They raised hens, too,
feeding them corn.
In winter, the people had only buckwheat noodles.
At night
a pine root was used to light the lamps.
Tomorrow they would exchange
a handful of corn for a handful of salt.
Their kimchi, unsalted, was tasteless.
At school
they sang the school song.
Instructor Kim Chang-hwan of the Sinheung Military Academy
shouted commands in a voice so resonant
it echoed off the surrounding hills.
They studied Korean language,
Korean history,
Korean geography,
calligraphy,
composition,
singing,
arithmetic, multiplication tables.
All such villages were burned to the ground.
Everyone was killed.
Everything ransacked.
Nobody was left to grind their teeth.
Old Cha Il-man
As the southern forces marched northward,
at Suritjae village on the banks of the Hantan River
one hundred humble thatched houses were set on fire.
All but one man died, leaving a deathly silence.
The one who survived, Cha Il-man, was sick and old.
He took one look at the dead village.
Crawling outside,
he drank lye beneath the wooden step.
His legs soon stiffened.
Nobody remained.
He himself was a word that nobody
could understand.
Hong Jin-su
His nickname was Inchworm.
On weeding days
he said not a word all day.
Some people working alone
mutter and
mutter,
saying things no one can understand.
But Inchworm Hong Jin-su said never a word.
Herons would fly in close, then fly away again.
In February 1951,
shortly before the second draft for the national militia,
the village youths
all drank castor oil to induce diarrhoea.
They had to lose weight.
Under 45 kilograms, they would be disqualified.
Later, however, whether 40 kg or 30,
they all passed the medical exam, second class.
Inchworm cut off the top of his right index finger
with an adze.
He buried the severed fingertip on the hill behind his house.
Within twelve days the finger healed.
Meanwhile he failed the medical, classed third grade.
Relieved, he set about selling tofu.
Putting the tofu trays on his shoulder
he left home early, before breakfast time.
Buy my tofu.
Buy my tofu.
He did evening rounds, too.
Buy my tofu.
Buy my tofu.
After his parents quit the world
he provided his four younger siblings with food,
fed them as well the tofu that was left unsold.
VOLUME 18
Ong-nye’s Husband
Putilovka village in far-away Hassan,
where three borders meet:
Korea, Manchuria, Russia.
In secret, Korean farmers
would cross into that region,
as yet free of bandits.
They built hovels to keep out wind and rain
and survived by grazing cattle and goats
every day on the grass of three countries.
There they lived, snaring birds
on the banks of the Tumen,
catching wild deer,
sowing grain and hunting.
While washing clothes by a stream,
hunter Jang Gil-seong’s daughter Ong-nye
met a man on a horse.
His eyes were hollow
with hunger.
He couldn’t even dismount by himself
Ong-nye wiped her wet hands and helped him down.
She went back home for some cold rice
and returned to feed him.
A Korean independence fighter,
he had crossed the river
on his dead commander’s horse,
pursued by the Japanese.
Actually, he’d rowed across,
the horse swam.
He hadn’t eaten for three days.
Ong-nye brought him home.
When her father returned from hunting, she begged:
Let this man become my husband.
Allow your daughter
to become this man’s wife,
Father!
Her father Jang Gil-seong
tossed his catch – two cock-pheasants –
at the stranger’s feet.
Old Madman
He goes about with a dog’s bone stuck in his belt.
He gobbles up earthworms
and frogs, too, all deftly caught
Heuh heuh,
heuh heuh heuh,
he laughs, looking at the sky,
the sky where hawks hover.
Neighbourhood kids
tease him,
throwing stones.
Heuh heuh,
he laughs.
&nbs
p; At the sound of a plane he falls flat on his back.
Asleep
under the bridge beyond the village,
his face becomes utterly holy,
utterly peaceful.
When the curs bark at him
he bows his head obsequiously, twisting his hands, saying:
‘I did wrong.
I did wrong.’
Tae-sun’s grandmother explains:
‘He’s a fellow from Uitteum in Sangchon-ri
who went mad after losing two sons.’
One was conscripted in the Pacific War and never came back.
One was drafted in the Korean War and never came back.
Gunfire in Bongdong-myeon, Wanju
Soldiers of the People’s Army
were despatched to every hamlet in the occupied areas.
One soldier arrived in Bongdong-myeon, Wanju, North Jeolla province.
A greenhorn soldier, always laughing,
he drank the liquor
that the villagers offered with a village girl,
then went into the bean-field with her.
This became known.
His comrades hastily shot him: no trial, nothing.
After that, not one but three soldiers
were stationed in Bongdong-myeon.
A little later, two left.
The third stayed for the last two months
of occupation, then left.
He never accepted a single leaf of tobacco,