Authors: Ko Un
Snow drove furiously down
onto the eight-year old.
Where are we?
Where are we?
Fields in a blizzard.
During the 4 January 1951 retreat,
behind a railway station near Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi province,
double-cropped barley fields were covered with snow.
Some eighty refugees wrapped in straw sacks
huddled on the ground in snowdrifts.
Among them
were Hyeong-mo, his father and mother,
with his two younger brothers.
How lucky they were to have survived together,
all the family.
How lucky they were, starving together and
eating together.
Toward nightfall, Hyeong-mo left to get firewood.
Boom!
A shell fell, fired in error.
The eighty went flying, vanished.
Hyeong-mo came rushing back.
Father,
mother,
brothers, gone.
Baek Seung-bok’s family, too,
who came south with them,
all the way from Jinnam-po, in South Pyeongan province.
Around the pit made by the shell
were a forearm,
a shoe,
a severed head,
a pair of glasses,
a corpse that was groaning then stopped groaning.
After that, Hyeong-mo, wrapped in a tattered blanket,
followed an orphan’s path, with no direction,
no north, south, east or west.
The blizzard stopped.
He shouted up at the frozen sky,
calling for mother, for father.
He called for his brothers, too,
Hyeong-jin!
Hyeong-ryeol!
In winter 1955 the whistles of Seoul-Busan trains could be heard faintly
in a remote village in Yeongdong, North Chungcheong province.
If there were train whistles to be heard,
the world was still the same world.
The hills were all bare together,
they would shiver at night.
Bare, the hills all looked the same,
no telling which was which.
Ocheon Mountain,
Mireuk Mountain,
Chotdae Peak,
the hill in front,
the hill behind Ssangbong village,
no telling which was which.
What the children drew were
always
bare, red hills,
hills of red clay.
Even the bellowing of oxen
was a red bellowing.
Over the ridge of one such hill, as the sun was setting,
a person was coming, slow and weary.
Who could it be?
Who other than a man
half insane,
half in his right mind?
Wife
and two children were killed
together by a mortar shell,
one ox was also killed.
He alone survived,
Yi Jong-su, a fellow with thick hair.
He had a high-pitched voice
like a wild goose.
Several millions died in the course of three years of war.
Among the dead
were Yi Jong-su’s family.
In the empty stable
all he could say was:
‘Hey Wife, hey Wife!’
and then
‘Jang-seop!
Cha-seon!
Cha-seop!’
Why do you know of nothing but your home village?
In Onjeong-ri, across from Daegwanbong village,
on the southern slopes of the Myeorak Mountain Range,
in Pyeongsan County, Hwanghae province,
out of forty-seven inhabitants
nine left with the People’s Army.
Onjeong-ri was a village with one mule,
five dogs,
and twenty-three rabbits.
Lots of mice, too.
Wild cats and badgers would appear by turns,
and a family of three wild boars used to come down
and trample the potato fields.
Sometimes a stately flock of ravens would alight.
When the mule neighed,
the chimneys that sent the suppertime smoke
soaring, soaring high
would listen to the mule’s neighing.
Fifteen-year-old Shin Hyeon-gu kept having mishaps.
He would get scratched bloody by holly leaves,
or hurt his hand while cutting wood.
He hoped one day to become a monk.
For that fifteen-year-old Shin Hyeon-gu,
the village he’d grown up in grew suffocating.
He was like a mule, like a baby wild boar,
that suddenly goes wild.
Luckily the war spared the village.
In his dreams, wings sprouted from his shoulders.
On a bitterly cold night
when ice nine centimetres thick was cracking,
hordes of Chinese volunteers
surged across the Yeseong River
after crossing the Yalu,
the Cheongcheon,
and the Daedong.
On that night Shin Hyeon-Gu
swam across the Yeseong River downstream from the ferry,
carrying two of his mother’s rings.
Her ancestor had been one of the leaders of the Donghak Uprising.
Air came through his nostrils, and water, too.
After fifteen minutes,
he reached Saemal on the other bank.
He pulled on the clothes he had rolled up and tied to his body.
They were clothes of ice.
When he turned around he seemed to hear his mother’s voice:
‘You alone at least
must live.
Off you go.
Off you go.’
Her words remained in his ears.
Mother!
He called out in the direction of the village he had left.
Decades of Armistice passed after he left home like that.
He was 63, had two sons, three daughters, and seven grandchildren.
One daughter was divorced, one not married.
In the darkness at the crack of dawn, those old rings,
at daybreak, those rings alone remaining from the past,
were the only strength left to him.
At heart he was always crossing rivers and going over mountains.
It was called a refugee camp
yet had not so much as an iron fence.
It was
simply a place, beyond Sut Pass,
where people put up second-hand tents
or built shacks with pieces of plywood,
to keep out the wind and rain.
We heard that Chinese troops would soon be coming
like a swarm of locusts.
We had to move again, from Songtan
to Jochiwon or to Daejeon.
Could be we might end up in Busan, the provisional capital.
Amidst all this confusion
Yu Byeong-cheol’s wife, from Sinanju in the North,
gave birth to a son.
Huddled in ragged quilted clothes, Yu Byeong-cheol
had it seems held on to a scrap of artistry.
He exclaimed with a laugh, ‘A migrant bird’s been born,’
and rejoiced, drinking a quart or more of cheap
soju
.
Over at last: the three months of the People's Republic.
Its local committee members
had to run away.
But they did not just run away
with eyes burning.
They took 150 people with them,
saying that they had to do night work at the aerodrome,
pushed them into air-raid shelters built by the Japanese army
near the end of the Japanese occupation.
The 150 were buried alive,
stabbed with bamboo spears
until their hearts leaped out,
stripped naked and raped,
beaten over the head
with stones.
They were pushed inside alive
and covered with earth.
In retribution against her right-wing father,
former head of the irrigation association,
they buried his lovely only daughter, Yi Jeong-sun,
after they had gang-raped her.
Pretty much a rotting corpse,
yet how peaceful
was her dead face, eyes so quietly shut,
how very peaceful.
About a year later,
the war was still far from over,
Yi Jeong-sun appeared in a dream to her friend Go Ok-hui
who lived in Okjeong-gol.
âOk-hui!
I've come back.
Our dog
used to leave marks of its journey
by pissing
as it followed mother across the fields.
I, too, left marks up there in heaven,
so I could come back now
without getting lost along the way.'
Go Ok-hui woke up and wept, alone. The first cock began to crow.
Her husband,
her tender-hearted,
slightly pockmarked,
generous-hearted husband,
was early requisitioned by the Japanese
as a labourer in the Pacific islands,
and never came back.
Field work and rice-paddy work, all was hers now.
Their older son grew up.
The younger one was born posthumously. He, too, grew up.
During the Korean War, the elder son joined the army
and never came back.
Nobody knew whether
he was alive or dead.
The younger boy, who had never seen his father,
went downtown
and on his way home,
though still only a lad,
got dragged off by the national defence corps.
It was talked of much later. Those were dark days.
She went out alone to weed the paddy field a second time
at the height of summer heat.
The sun beat down mercilessly
on the back of widow Mun of the Nampyeong family.
As Lao Tzu said:
Heaven is not benevolent.
Winter fields rest well.
If their owner is industrious
they are harrowed
then exposed to the icy wind,
and they rest well.
A notification of death-in-action arrived – a mimeographed form.
The box with the remains of their son,
staff sergeant Kim Seung-ho, did not arrive.
In that single day,
his father, Kim Chil-seong,
aged from fifty-one
to something like seventy.
Leaving his wife wailing and beating the floor.
he went out into the winter fields
alone.
There was nowhere to look. He smoked his third cigarette.
There is nothing but the Duman River
outside the town of Gyeongseong, North Hamgyeong province.
People sowed millet
in stony fields,
and it grew.
Despite the bitter cold
it managed to survive into the following spring.
On the day the one worm-eaten peach tree blossomed
the women smiled brightly.
The poor family of An Deok-su
lived on good terms with Bak Gi-jun’s family,
sharing a kitchen.
The two families
would cook together
and share the food.
On days when the two families quarrelled,
An Deok-su’s family
would cook first and eat,
after which Bak Gi-jun’s family
would prepare their meal and eat.
When An Deok-su’s daughter Il-sun
and Bak Gi-jun’s son Seong-ho
went into the willow grove on the sandbanks in the Duman River
and didn’t come back,
the two families went out to search for them.
They became in-laws.
Poverty divides people,
and it brings them together.
When reclaimed land is continually trodden down
it becomes firm.
About 3,000,000 people moved South;
more than 100,000 moved North.
Those 100,000 were welcomed splendidly.
But one by one they disappeared
until few remained.
The 3,000,000 who came South were like roots.
They kept saying
they were uprooted
but their roots went deep.
A home is a grave on a hill buried in the heart.
A home
is the memory of one who has left it behind.
A home exists in time.
That 10,000,000 families are divided between North and South
is one fact of modern Korea’s history.
It is not a past that we should go back to,
but the start of tomorrow.
I want to go back. I want to go back.
I want to go back to a home on the banks of the Duman River.
I want to go back to my home beside the Daedong River.
I want to ride a sleigh there.
Mother,
are you still alive?
There was one,
O Jong-cheol,
who did not linger in the past.
Born in Wonsan, South Hamgyeong Province,
he crossed the 38th Parallel southward shortly after Korea became independent.
He lived like a mole.
He lived as a penniless sluggard.
Then, reborn, he studied at an evening college,
set up a textile factory and
a leather goods factory.
He never once talked about home.
He bought a hill, bought vast rice fields
in Yeoju, Gyeonggi province.
He set up empty graves for three generations of his ancestors.
On the autumn harvest memorial day, they were his home village.