I’ll hand you over to the security forces.
Soon loudspeakers echoed over Aegi Hill:
The reactionary Mo Yun-suk is hiding on this mountain.
Report her on sight.
In an extreme situation people have to betray even friends and colleagues.
In an extreme situation even lyric poets
become cold-blooded enemies.
In an extreme situation a delicate spinster
becomes a cruel witch.
In an extreme situation a simple rural emotion becomes an evil ideology.
When Seoul was recaptured, No Cheon-myeong was sentenced to death.
That was commuted to a life sentence,
then reduced to twenty years,
and soon
she was released on bail after writers sent in a petition.
Dressed in a white jacket and black skirt, No Cheon-myeong
turned up at a meeting of woman-writers in ruined Myeong-dong.
A Chance Encounter
Allied search teams were in full swing.
Enemy search teams also.
Somewhere near Palgong Mountain
Jeong Hae-bong,
a member of the twelfth regiment’s search team,
encountered Jeong Hae-seon, from the enemy search team.
They stood there, ten yards apart,
aiming rifles at each other.
Then one exclaimed:
‘Brother!’
The other replied:
‘Is that you, Hae-seon?’
They fell into each other’s arms.
The elder was twenty,
the younger eighteen.
Jeong Hae-seon joined the Southern search unit.
The two brothers, Jeong Hae-bong
and Jeong Hae-seon
both ate a lot of rice.
Rice was their hometown, their parents..
Eon-nyeon in Siberia
In the 1920s
some Koreans
made their way beyond Mongolia
into Russia,
journeyed all the way to near Lake Baikal
and settled in a ruined hut kept standing by props.
Such a long way to go to live.
Despite blizzards
and days so cold their urine froze,
they managed
not to freeze to death.
So harsh a way to live.
One freezing morning
a girl in Korean dress, long skirt and blouse,
a water pot on her head
went to fetch water
carrying a club to smash the ice
Not yet called Anna or Tatiana,
just Eon-nyeon, Pretty Girl.
Her father had not come back home for several days.
Boarding a sledge,
he went off to a hunting-lodge
in Bear Forest
Eon-nyeon had
two younger brothers
and two younger sisters
The family had grown as they journeyed on.
They’re not yet called Sergei or Josip or Boris but
First Twin
Second Twin
Dong-seop
Geut-seop
Below Eon-nyeon
Little Girl
Last Girl
Once she turned eight Eon-nyeon became an adult.
She had been living the days
she was destined to live.
Seong-jin
The Japanese imposed the solar calendar on the Korean people.
They abolished the first Korean festival,
the first day of the first lunar month,
Lunar New Year –
New Year ancestral offerings they abolished too.
January 1, solar new year, was the Japanese New Year.
Unknown to the authorities
we celebrated our own New Year.
Lunar New Year was our Independence Movement.
Broiled beef
fried flat cakes
cinnamon punch afloat with thin flakes of ice
boiled rice
steamed fish
Wearing new clothes we went round paying our respects.
But Seong-jin’s family in their grass hut outside the village
kept neither the Korean New Year
nor the Japanese New Year.
You would find there no bright party clothes,
no rice cakes.
Unearthing the root of an arrowroot vine
from the sunny side of some hill
Seong-Jin would chew hard on the root
for sudden new energy.
On a New Year’s morning
his prick stood erect in vain.
In June that year the war began.
One month later, when the People’s Army was in charge for three months,
he served as illiterate chairman for the Democratic Young People’s Front
after which he went missing, permanently.
Hallelujah
Outside Ganghwa town on Ganghwa Island
there’s Gapgot Point, a place where breezes blow.
In the fields of Gapgot,
once the distinctive February wind drops off,
the March wind comes along.
Skylarks venturing upward are hurt by the wind.
Across the whirlwind-stirred sea,
in the haze of the Gimpo plains
the April wind urges young rice seed-beds to sprout.
The seedlings are planted out in May.
As people plant the rice, they shout:
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Once Christianity arrived at isolated villages
believers
and non-believers
became deadly foes.
In a single village
Baptists and Episcopalians
each the others’ foes
could not intermarry
or attend each others’ wedding parties.
A member of the Holiness Church, Gwak Il-gyu,
who shouts Hallelujah a hundred times a day,
is getting married to Hong Sun-ja of the same church,
who shouts Hallelujah two hundred times a day.
Episcopalians dare not attend
the wedding.
Even if they’re cousins
or distant relatives.
Former co-workers,
former close friends and kin
vanished,
became one another’s foes.
The moment the North Korea armies arrived
those on the left arose and killed those of the right.
Once the North withdrew
the right was left
having slaughtered all those of the left.
The churches prospered.
The churches distributed
American relief food and goods.
People came flocking
to collect wheat flour.
They even received a second-hand suit of clothes.
All were forced to shout Hallelujah!
Out in the fields at harvest time too:
Hallelujah!
Hallelujah!
Ji Ha-ryeon
At the height of Japanese rule the blue sky begot despair.
She was a poet’s wife,
a poet’s comrade.
From the very start her belated love
was heading for open-eyed darkness.
When she published her short story ‘Farewell’ in the review Munjang
in 1940, in the midst of the Sino-Japanese War
and just before the Pacific War,
colonised Korea
was proud of its camellia-like woman writer,
Ji Ha-ryeon.
She was Masan’s drunken spirit,
the desire of the night sea in Masan Bay.
Lovely Ji Ha-ryeon fell in love with handsome Im Hwa’s tuberculosis.
She made a secret conversion.
Poet Im Hwa’s original
name was Yi Hyeon-uk.
They had the happiest times after Liberation.
Her husband,
putting on light linen clothes,
invited Kim Sun-nam
and Ham Se-deok to dinner,
a meal which his wife in her apron prepared to perfection.
They joined the underground,
went North.
Just after the war, the poet was executed,
the poet’s wife
was thrown into an asylum.
She spent days of despair, raving and fainting,
then died like trash.
Ideology, that was their dream.
Ideology, that was their death.
Ji Ha-ryeon.
Literature, revolution, love
beneath skies that spout blue blood.
Lieutenant Bak Baek
Lieutenant Bak Baek,
adjutant of the search company, 2nd battalion, 16th regiment, 8th division.
He advanced as far as Chosan
on the banks of the Yalu River. He was very much moved, impassioned.
It was early winter, 1950.
He gazed across the river
at Manchuria, Chinese land.
They encountered the Communist Chinese army.
His body turned into a hedgehog.
On a hill
between Huicheon and Gujang
he was taken prisoner by the Chinese army.
The company commander was killed in action,
two soldiers were killed, three injured,
and the remaining thirty taken prisoner.
The POW camp at Gwansan in Hwapung
held five hundred South Korean soldiers
and three hundred American soldiers.
In the bitter winter prisoners kept dying.
In the camp
each room held twenty men, no space to lie down.
If one died,
the rest had a little more space.
Keeping prisoners’ corpses
for two or three days in the room,
leaning them against the wall
at roll-call,
the rest shared the rations of the dead.
They were given one handful of corn twice a day.
In one day fifty or so died.
One cupful of lice came crawling
from every corpse.
Some died gnawing icicles.
Numb from frostbite,
they felt no pain when a finger was cut off.
Lieutenant Bak Baek did not die. He came back in an exchange of prisoners.
Bracken in Namdaemun’s Dokkaebi Market
Goods from the PX on the American base at Yongsan are loaded onto a truck.
Kim Cheol-su, a Korean,
and Harry, a black American,
are expert thieves.
They pass the checkpoint at the back gate
when MP John Beckham is on duty,
that’s 4.30 in the morning.
At 5.30
they deliver to Pyo Jong-seon in Namdaemun’s Dokkaebi Market.
Watches,
chocolate,
‘Akadama’ cigarettes,
Camels,
blankets,
military boots,
UN jackets,
fountain pens,
woollen underwear,
gum,
electric razors.
Pyo Jong-seon is from Haeju, up in Hwanghae province.
He never haggles over goods.
He pays what they ask.
This makes him popular,
So the thieves
sell to him cheap.
His nickname is Bracken of Mount Suyang.
On Mount Suyang in Haeju
there’s a shrine commemorating
the Chinese brothers Boyi and Shuqi.
When Mount Suyang Bracken
goes home,
he tells his first grand-daughter about Simcheong,
the second one about Princess Nangnang.
He was one of the rich folk of Chungmu-ro street
but one day
American MPs, preceded by Korean MPs,
raided his store and took him away.
Yi Jung-seop
In 1952
people were drinking Nakdong River soju.
In a bar in an alley of Hyangchon-dong in Daegu
Yi Jung-seop vomited.
Colonel Yi Gi-ryeon
jokingly mocked the drunken Yi Jung-seop:
‘Hey! You smell like a proletarian!’
That means
you’re a commie, you’re a red.
The next day Yi Jong-seop, having sobered up,
remembered the words about his proletarian smell.
He remembered them the day after,
and the next day, as well.
He went to see the head of investigations in Daegu police station.
‘I am not a red.
Please certify
that I’m not a red.’
His friend the poet Ku Sang came to take him home.
Everywhere people were suffering from red persecution complexes.
If someone says
you’re a red, you’re done.
If someone reports you as a red, you’re done.
Such was the age. Fearful.
I am not a red.
Two Men
September 29, 1950.
The day before, the three months of communist rule had ended.
The Republic of Korea that had run away
came back.
The city was still empty.
At the Gwanhwamun intersection
one man came limping from Jong-ro 1-ga.
A ragged figure was approaching
along Sinmun-ro.
They met in the middle of the intersection. They were strangers to each other.
For a full thirty minutes
they talked.
They told tales
and listened to tales
about how each had survived,
survived in hiding.
How painful it was to live alone,
how despondent they felt
to have survived alone.
The two men shared a cigarette, then parted, saying: ‘See you again.’
Midday came.
At the intersection,
not so much as a mouse in sight.
Na Jeong-gu of Myeong-dong
Anyone was free to get drunk and collapse in ruined Myeong-dong,
free to piss to his heart’s content
on the eulalia growing as dense as pubic hair
between the pieces of broken brick
and cement walls.
Anyone was free to show off,
bragging how splendid he’d once been
but now he was a beggar.
Anyone was free to become an artist
the moment he stood beside an artist.
Beside the tall painter Kim Hwan-gi
anyone could turn into a modern artist
who painted pictures of Joseon-era white jars.
Beside Kim Hyang-an, the former wife of poet Yi Sang,
now the wife of Kim Hwan-gi,
anyone could turn into a stylish essayist.
While walking along with chain-smoking Yi Myeong-on,
anyone could turn into an essayist and former journalist.
Poet Bak In-hwan died
after writing his boisterous poem ‘The Rocking Horse and the Lady, Virginia Woolf’.
Anyone who shook hands with Kim Su-yeong,
who had joined the volunteer army
and was just out of Geoje Island POW camp,
became a post-war poet.
In ruined Myeong-dong there was the freedom of the True and False as one.
The drunkard Na Jeong-gu,
who pushed his way in wherever people were drinking,
was today a poet,
tomorrow an essayist.
What might he be the day after?
So long as he had a mouth to drink with
he was free to enter the bars Poem or Eunjeong
and join any group he found there.
Ah, in the ruins of Myeong-dong under the Republic of Korea
there was freedom for every kind of extravagance and bluff,
freedom hanging in the air like the spell of a dead age.
Hong Sa-jun
One writer’s dream was glorious, his life short.
Hong Sa-jun,
a fine-featured young man,
was a literary star
during the three months of the communist occupation.
North Korean writers praised him highly.
Young Hong Sa-jun’s novel The Deer
was idolised as a model of proletarian literature.
Writers who came down to Seoul
such as An Hui-nam,
Yi Won-jo,
Yi Gi-yeong,
Bak Tae-won encouraged him, one after another.
On their recommendation
he enjoyed the honor of visiting Pyongyang.
In August 1950
he returned from his visit to Pyongyang.
He turned from being a leftist to a rightist.
Pyongyang had disillusioned him.