Authors: Ko Un
Opposite the primary school in Hwagok-dong
remains one house from the initial development.
Most of the cement blocks in its garden wall have crumbled,
the iron gates have rusted away.
Yi Jeong-gu, owner of that house,
lost his wife a year ago
and slowly went mad, aphasic.
Time just flows, flows on
as he mutters, mutters,
mutters from dawn when he wakes
till night when he falls asleep.
He mutters when the wind blows.
Mutters when it rains.
Mutters when it sleets.
A burglar broke into that house,
heard the incessant muttering from the bedroom,
threw up his hands and ran away.
It happened that a rumour spread
of a Goryeo celadon vase in that old house.
Who knows, maybe someone had already taken it,
leaving behind just the muttering within.
Creepers have grown so wild in the garden
someone could easily be lost and bound…
‘Even now, when it rains
I leave the window open
lest I miss the sound
of footsteps
as you approach in the rain.’
Ever since the 4 January retreat in 1951,
he lived in the South,
husband of a divided couple
in a divided country,
never taking a second wife,
sleeping alone in a simple cot.
He settled in Busan and established a modest hospital.
Nobody was ever sent away;
sick and poor,
all received treatment and his loving touch.
For that, he became the model for the protagonist
of Yi Gwang-su’s novel
Love
.
It was to meet Jang Gi-ryeo, that holy figure,
like big brother meeting younger brother,
like younger brother meeting big brother,
that the great Quaker teacher Ham Seok-heon,
using other errands as his excuse,
so often travelled down to Busan from Seoul.
There was once a hawk that had three heads:
with one it looked forward,
with one it looked behind,
and one it turned
to look up and down.
Soaring high into the sky, way up,
it took aim at all of Joseon’s corrupt officials.
That’s
him
, and
him
, and
there
he
is.
It dived with sharp eyes glaring,
tore at them with its ferocious beak.
In the name of the people,
it hunted out all the grasping officials
so prevalent in the 400 years of the Joseon Era,
sparing but the two hundred men who were clean-handed.
Wondrous!
When the people’s most ardent wishes and rancour
ran to the high heavens,
the three-headed hawk went flying up.
During the 1970s he never stuck his head above water.
While infiltrating this or that dark, dank factory
here and there in Incheon,
he earned several vocational certificates.
He gladly threw away his diplomas
from Seoul National University’s Business College and other such.
In the factories he was a respectable
Homo Faber
.
Face like a white candle,
face like a white goat,
but in his brown eyes
a single unwavering resolve
undeterred through decades
would blaze furtively for an instant
then sink back again out of sight.
Since he’d resolved to spend his life united with the workers,
he was known to very few friends
throughout the 70s.
He never surfaced, devoting the intensity of his youth to this task.
He cared nothing for fame or distinction
or any of that, not then nor later in life.
And to his death, he chose to set aside
that other desperate self who had kept a conscious record
of all the tortures he had undergone.
After the Democratic Youth Association incident
he did not turn toward groups of intellectuals.
He turned to the poor
and took as wife
one of his comrades
who lived among them.
His face was invisible among the dissidents of the 70s.
His address was a slum,
unlit,
in the darkness after the moon has set.
With that dignity and manly seriousness
a mother admires in a son-in-law,
the more he tried to be modest,
the more he was like a kimchi jar buried in the ground.
‘Try to live with contradictions.’
If you lived in the face of such contradictions, you would know:
it’s hard just being one of the common folk.
He was fastidious through and through.
He was extreme to a fault.
That is why, even in prison,
after carefully folding up his bedding
he would wipe the cell floor
with a rag, several times.
What purity the word ‘enemy’ had
when it sprang to his lips
with no hint of eloquence.
He was fastidious even with his comrades.
He remained fastidious
when later he disappeared
in the midst of the Gwangju massacre.
and crossed the Pacific hidden in the bottom of a boat
in the darkness,
in the darkness,
and became Political Exile Number One.
His wife, Shin Hye-su, did not want him to become a pastor.
His mother wanted her son to be a pastor.
He himself so far had no thought of becoming a pastor.
He was simply the son of an admiral,
a graduate in engineering.
He was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment
for the Democratic Youth Association incident,
but he refused to appeal and became a convict.
That was his starting-point.
He hurled himself into the YH sit-in incident in 1979
that paved the way for the collapse of President Park’s Yushin regime.
Few could compete with him as an organiser.
Wherever he went
he found something to do
which never failed
to lead to yet greater things.
He had a tragic tenacity,
like the sticky sap emerging from the stump
after a large tree is felled.
A tragic tenacity…
even in his glad smile on meeting you after a long absence.
In 1970, the young labourer Jeon Tae-il died.
In 1979, the working girl Kim Gyeong-suk of YH Trading plunged to her death
from a rally on the 4th floor of the New Democratic Party building in Mapo.
By dying, one opened an age;
by dying, one closed the age.
Behind the grave of Kim Gyeong-suk stands the grave of Park Chung-hee.
Go and see.
From the information service at Yeongdeungpo police station
he was transferred to Gangseo police station as soon as it opened,
to the No. 2 intelligence section there,
and throughout the Seventies
his job was to accompany one poet everywhere.
The pomade he used
to slick down
his thick hair
smelt disgusting at first
but his companion got used to it.
Whenever that poet went to preside at a wedding
he went along too.
When the poet went to a bar
he’d sit over on the far side
with a glass.
Then,
if the poet went to the bathhouse
after a night’s drinking,
he’d go along too,
get into the hot tub naked with him,
and learned to switch between hot and cold tubs.
When the poet went to lecture in Busan, Gwangju, Daegu,
he went along.
When orders came from above,
he’d deploy a combat police unit to keep the poet from leaving home.
A bright-eyed, trustworthy man,
he often wore a blue shirt.
He was reliable but had problems with his wife,
who had no luck with horoscopes and was always quarrelling.
Then, when that poet went to prison,
he deposited the poet’s meagre royalties in the bank.
The full moon rose
over a hillside slum in Bongcheon-dong, southern Seoul.
A young man was climbing the steep path
around 11.30 p.m.
after working overtime.
His name was Yun Sang-gon, he had grown up well,
though knowing nothing of father or mother.
At the top of the steep path
someone was waiting for him in an alleyway, freezing cold.
Her name was Kim Sun-ja.
The full moon was high in the sky.
In a world abounding with the sound of moonlight,
how could poverty be all there was?
Twenty-year-old Sang-gon’s tough hand
seized seventeen-year-old Sun-ja’s coarsened hand.
Sun-ja had no smell of face-powder.
There was nothing like, ‘I love you’.
The young man trembled as he spoke:
‘Let’s not change.’
Choking, the girl nodded.
She bit her lips in confusion and blood gathered in her mouth.
The 38th parallel cut the Korean peninsula in two
from the summer of 1945.
Once again
after the summer of 1950
the DMZ divided the Korean peninsula
with guns aimed across at each other since 1953.
One hundred and sixty miles of barbed wire.
Father in the North,
and son in the South were both experts on birds.
The son in the south tied his name
to a bird's leg and set it loose.
A few years later
the father in the north
set loose a bird carrying his name.
No message.
Had there been a message
it would have been a crime against national security
under the South's anti-communist laws,
and a crime under the North's criminal laws.
Each merely attached his name to a bird,
set it free,
sent it back.
That southern son was Won Byeong-o, a professor at Kyunghee University.
The father was an ornithologist in North Korea.
The beauty of blood ties in this time of division
was also the sorrow of the son's
already bald head.
On a corner of Hyoje-dong opposite Jongno 5ga in Seoul
all day long
a blind beggar lay hunched over
wearing dark glasses.
He was murmuring something,
no telling what,
murmuring, murmuring.
Placing before him a ragged cap
he collected 10
won
coins, 100
won
coins.
Considering the patient hard work of not moving all day long,
the beggar’s wage was far too low.
Apart from occasional crackdowns,
our country offers the freedom and right to be a beggar.
But this beggar, once night fell,
rose to his feet, holding a slender cane,
and quietly headed for the alley of bars
on the slopes of Ehwa-dong.
There he removed his dark glasses and opened blind eyes.
He ordered a drink at his regular bar,
‘Hey, give me
soju
and that.’
‘That’ usually meant a side-dish of spicy fried brawn.
Five years later, that fake blind beggar moved
to the station square down in Jochiwon, South Chungcheong province.
A little thief is better
than a thief,
than a big thief.
A beggar is better
than a little thief.
Why, wasn’t Sakymuni a chief of beggars?
In Goguryeo, the nation founded by Go Ju-mong at age fifteen
the royal palace was a thatched cottage.
The waters of the Yalu rose far off.
Day by day the nation prospered.
The cottage turned into an imposing palace.
The sixth king, Taejo,
ascended the throne aged seven.
The king played with his top.
His mother looked after the child-king.
King Jinheung of Silla, too,
became king at seven,
while his aunt exercised royal power.
Isn’t regency more than playing the king?
His height when sitting was that of an ordinary person standing unnoticed.
While studying at the Jinju Agricultural High School,
and after graduating, too,
he could not for an instant live without Buddhism.
Already married, and one daughter.
First he crossed the sea,
staying at a number of temples in Japan,
then returned to become a monk at Okcheon-sa temple in Goseong,
the Venerable Bak Han-yeong his master.
After studying his fill
he went to deliver a sermon
at Hoguk-sa temple in Jinju, his home.
In the evening following the sermon
his mother came into his room
and produced a kitchen knife from her sleeve.
If you don’t come back home with me tonight,
I’ll stab myself in the belly until I’m dead.
What I want is a grandson.
He had no choice but to follow his mother
and return to his wife for just that one night.
After that, blaming himself for his apostasy,
he went everywhere barefoot.
And still he nourished great dreams.
So, during the Japanese occupation
he started the National Student Monks’ Assembly.
then in 1954 he organised the National Conference of Monks,
establishing the Jogye Order after a sit-in fast
with a hundred monks and a hundred fifty nuns.
He held several posts, such as first General Manager,
Chairman of the Order Committee,
and Supreme Patriarch.
His preaching was not consistent with logic.
He just went on talking endlessly
no way of telling
beginning end
middle
talking all night long until the day shone bright
skipping even the morning chanting.
He died in November of Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-One, at the age of sixty-nine.