Authors: Ko Un
In January 1951, Yi Cheol-su was fourteen.
His grandmother, Yu Bun-nyeo,
his father, Yi Jong-muk,
his mother, Ms Baek,
his younger brother, Cheol-ho,
the farmhand, Mr Bak,
the maid, Cham-rye with the double-crowned hair,
all six were massacred for the crime of being reds.
However,
Cheol-Su and his younger sister Bok-nam survived,
having gone to their mother’s home.
The southern soldiers
dragged ten-year-old Bok-nam off
and drove a nail through her palm
to force her to say she was a red.
‘I’m not a red,
I’m not a red,’
she screamed.
Finally,
she said,
‘I’m a red,’
and fainted.
The world was frozen.
The sky
was frozen
blue,
deep blue.
Her brother, Cheol-su,
afraid of the world,
afraid of the soldiers,
stole away into the mountains.
Inevitably,
he became a young partisan guerrilla.
In 1956,
nurse Yi Bok-nam of the Red Cross Hospital in Daejeon,
a scar in her right palm where the nail went through, was quiet.
Right-handed as a child,
she was quiet now and left-handed.
She was so good at giving subcutaneous injections
that the patients never knew if the needle was in or not.
When she delivered an injection into a vein
nobody felt the least pain.
Sadder by far to lose his mother at eleven
than at five.
At five, he wouldn’t have known the sorrow.
He grew up on sorrow,
here, on the earth.
Paternal aunt’s skirt,
maternal aunt’s skirt,
maternal uncle’s wife’s skirt,
as he grew, he learned that none of those
was as good as his mother’s.
In lieu of fertile earth,
he put down roots in rock,
so his life was tough.
The leaves that would dance when it rained
withered.
When he was three,
his father had died.
After that the years were all uneasy.
In January 1951 when he was eleven,
his mother was dragged off to Baksan Valley
and died with the other villagers.
She died without learning why she must die.
The noun ‘red’ –
a traitor who secretly collaborated with communist guerrillas –
that was all.
A few shards of human bone
no one could tell apart,
whether they were his mother’s –
who could never tell A from B –
or someone else’s
emerged from the ground.
Twenty-year-old Im Chae-hwa’s eyes grew moist.
This world was all wrong.
The official name of the Geochang Massacre of the Innocents
was the CheongYa Operation.
Some six hundred people were brought
into the classrooms of Sinwon primary school.
One officer asked if any were families of military policeman.
A few families came forward.
It was true.
A few more families came forward.
This was not true.
They claimed they were MP families
in order to survive.
Then township head Park Yeong-bo stepped forward,
brazen faced,
with a large birthmark on his face.
He dragged one man out:
‘You’re from no MP family.’
Then he dragged another one out:
‘How can
you
be from a policeman’s family?’
The six hundred or more townsfolk were bound and taken away.
Gunfire ran out in a gully
beneath a steep hillside.
Then
all was quiet.
Ten years later came the April Revolution.
On the day a cenotaph was to be erected
the families of the victims
went
en masse
to Park Yeong-bo’s house.
They dragged him a couple of miles
and made him stand before the graves.
He ran away.
People hurled stones furiously.
He fell as he fled.
One year later came the military coup of May 1961.
People were arrested
for the murder of Park Yeong-bo.
The CheongYa Operation is still on. It’s lasted a long time.
On 31 December 1951
President Syngman Rhee reluctantly ordered the citizens of Seoul to evacuate.
The Chinese human wave strategy
was once again threatening Seoul.
General Ridgeway, commanding the American forces,
ordered his men to retreat to the south of the Han River.
On 3 January 1951 –
not much of a new year –
the government hurriedly left.
Three hundred thousand Seoul citizens
had to cross the frozen Han River
to head farther
and farther south.
In Waryong-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul,
one newborn,
the youngest child of the owner of the Seonil Printing Company,
a baby not yet entered in the family register
so still nameless,
was just called,
Dear,
My dear,
My weevil, little rice weevil.
It crossed the Han River ice
on its mother’s back
So it began life.
They were lucky. At Suwon they got a ride on a freight train.
Su-dong’s grandmother
who lived below Jinnamgwan Hall in Yeosu, South Jeolla province,
knew exactly how many roundworms
her little grandson Su-dong had in his stomach.
When I’m with my grandson
I can see the camellias on Odong Island;
more than that, I can even see
the camellias on Geomun Island over the sea.
Yeong-u, a refugee child,
was extremely envious of Su-dong.
Ah, if only I had such a clairvoyant grandmother!
The siren of the boat heading for Tong-yeong came echoing.
Or maybe it was the boat
from
Tong-yeong?
If you did not provide a traveller with a place to sleep,
your family was disgraced.
If you offered cold food
to a traveller,
several generations of your family were disgraced.
Even sixty years ago,
even fifty years ago,
even in days when the nation was stolen from us,
even in wartime,
traces of that old hospitality remained.
Whenever you set off
carrying only a staff and a change of clothes,
each village you passed through
took warm-hearted care of you,
your food and lodging.
If you stayed somewhere for three days, then fell sick,
they’d even provide you with medicine.
Long ago, when Hamel and his companions,
Dutch survivors of shipwreck,
were being escorted from Jeju Island to Seoul
by way of Jeolla Province,
they received a warmer welcome
than they had ever received
in any Christian country in the world.
It was the hospitality given
when humans meet other human beings.
They were moved to say: on our weary journey
the generous hearts of Joseon’s people
are incomparable with those of other lands
Some centuries later,
after the war,
that hospitality vanished.
Not only were visitors treated coldly;
people began to report them to the police.
A suspicious person is a spy.
A traveller is a spy.
Anyone loitering at the seaside early in the morning,
anyone who laughs for no reason
at the sight of someone, anyone, all are spies.
Report them.
Report them and earn a reward that will change your luck.
In this country today we have no more wandering travellers.
In 1926, Korea’s Provisional Government
was being pursued all the time,
starving
as it fled along the shores of the Yangtze River.
Kim Gu, the acting premier,
had abolished things like birthdays long ago.
He was stern with himself:
How can people fighting to regain their nation
celebrate a birthday?
However, Na Seok-ju found out when Kim Gu’s birthday was,
pawned his clothes
and bought two kilos of pork.
Everyone cheered up.
With that meat, they were spared for once
their usual poor breakfast.
Kim Gu scolded them:
This will not do.
This will not do.
The Independence Movement knows no birthdays.
Na Seok-ju soon after threw a bomb
that scared the Japanese out of their wits.
He sacrificed himself.
He became a man with no birthday forever.
The war did not spare even public cemeteries.
The public cemetery in Manguri,
was the underworld of Seoul.
On September 30, 1950,
even that site
became a battlefield.
While six thousand graves lay there,
UN soldiers
and communist soldiers
showered bullets
between the graves,
charged at each other,
stabbed one another with bayonets.
Bodies of fallen soldiers
lay scattered here and there
among the graves.
Bodies of black soldiers,
white soldiers,
bodies of communist soldiers,
were scattered all over the unmown grass.
Seventy-five minutes of deadly battle,
seventy-three dead bodies on both sides:
that was all.
Manguri Cemetery went back to being a cemetery.
Seoul belonged to the enemy for three months
under the rule of the North Korean People’s Republic.
The American air force’s bombing raids
went on day after day.
Seoul was reduced to ruins.
Grass grew
between the broken bricks in the ruins.
South Korean troops
recaptured Seoul.
The Northern flag was lowered
from the flagstaff on the Government Building,
the American flag was raised,
followed by the South Korean flag,
and the two fluttered there.
Seoul was under martial law.
Curfew lasted from seven in the evening
until five the next morning,
the time for mice.
Checkpoints stood here and there
in the ruins.
The police who had come back
set about arresting those who had collaborated during the past three months,
even children under ten
The kid of the noodle bar in Juja-dong in central Seoul,
got to know about this harsh world
from early on.
He got to know all about
the world with its beaters-up
and its beaten,
a world where there were thieves
amidst all that fear,
a world where even robbers
and thieves were arrested and beaten with clubs.
He was envious of robbers, envious of thieves.
North Korean soldiers
who drove south
of the 38th parallel
in the summer of 1950…
North Korean soldiers who supervised night operations on aerodromes.
North Korean soldiers never smoked a cigarette,
afraid of American airplanes:
‘The glow of a cigarette can be seen 5 kilometres away.’
They were sixteen,
seventeen years old.
They were carrying submachine guns as tall as themselves.
They had just been mobilised from remote villages.
They were naive,
very shy.
Boys like them were dumped out by the basketful
into the exorbitant war.
Everyone was leaving
leaving in a hurry
southward, southward, fleeing refugees
on the 4 January Retreat in 1951,
all but one.
He who refused to leave
had the notion of stopping
this immense calamity,
with his two hands
at any cost
stopping
this war,
a war in which fellow-countrymen were killing one another
left and right
South and North.
Disorder
lawlessness
thieves
ransackers of empty houses
those who had an eye on refugees’ bundles
extortionists charged with arresting collaborators
who threatened you with jail
unless you gave up your valuables
absolute confusion
every kind of crime.
After such chaos,
by the end of December 1950
Seoul was utterly empty; everyone had left.
Except one:
Choi Ik-hwan.
Who refused to leave, saying
somehow or other
this brutal game of death must stop.
Choi Ik-hwan.
He remained in his small room
in a shabby house in Seongbuk-dong in Seoul and wouldn’t leave,
intending to meet the approaching Northern army
to bring about an end to the war
and persuade the leaders to stop the fighting.
Far from making for Busan
where all were fleeing,
he didn’t even head back toward his hometown in Hongseong.
Early in his life
he joined Son Byeong-hui’s
Donghak
,
and opened his eyes to the people.
Then he went to Shanghai
with Euichin, one of the last Korean princes,
and took charge of an Independence Movement group,
one known as
Daedongdan
.
After Liberation,
he was a member of the Democratic Assembly.
In January 1951 he did meet Northern officials
and risked his life negotiating a ceasefire.
Starving,
shivering with cold,
suffering from pleurisy,
he never left.