My Father, by Hwang Sunwon

1-1/16”

printed in the u.s.a.

ISBN 978-0-231-14968-6

Lo st S o u ls

Weatherhead Books on Asia

Praise for ˘ Lost Souls Hwang Sunwon’s

˘ (1915–2000) is one hwang sunwon

bruce and ju- chan fulton are the

translators of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction and have received several awards and fellowships for their translations, including a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship (the first ever awarded for a Korean translation into English) and a residency at the Banff International Literary Translation Center (the first ever awarded for a translation from an Asian language). The Fultons’ most recent translation was the critically acclaimed work There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories by Ch’oe Yun.

c o l u m b i a u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s n e w y o r k www.cup.columbia.edu

into English, most recently Trees on a Slope.

jacket image: © bettmann/corbis book/jacket design: chang jae lee

of modern Korea’s most influential writers. His career ranges from the colonial 1930s to the industrial 1990s, and he is the author of more than one hundred stories, seven novels, and two collections of poetry.

Four of his novels have been translated

“Notwithstanding the deep ideological divide that has structured the South Korean literary scene, ˘ has always been acknowledged by Hwang Sunwon many South Korean critics, from opposing camps, as one of the consummate masters of the short fiction genre. By rendering Hwang’s exquisitely crafted stories into equally superb English prose, Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton’s translation introduces us to the universalist aesthetics Hwang endeavored to achieve, challenging the stereotyped and selfstereotyped notions of South Korean literature as narrowly ideological and politicized.”

stories

Lost Souls echoes the exceptional work of China’s Shen Congwen and Japan’s Kawabata Yasunari. Modernist narratives set in the metropolises of Tokyo and Pyongyang alternate with starkly realistic portraits of rural life. Surrealist tales suggest the unsettling sensation of colonial domination, while stories of the outcast embody the thrill and terror of independence and survival in a land dominated by tradition and devastated by war.

hwang

Jin-Kyung Lee, University of California, San Diego

“The strength of this important volume is its focus on the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, not only offering us works that have not been translated before but also breaking down the colonial/postcolonial divide.”

Theodore Q. Hughes, Columbia University

Lo st So ul s

C

columbia

these captivating short stories portray three major periods in modern Korean history: the forces of colonial modernity during the late 1930s; the postcolonial struggle to rebuild society after four decades of oppression, emasculation, and cultural exile (1945 to 1950); and the attempt to reconstruct a shattered land and a traumatized nation after the Korean War.

˘ hwang sunwon Transl ated by

bruce

and

ju-chan fulton

Written during the chaos of 1945, “Booze” recounts a fight between Koreans for control of a formerly Japanese-owned distillery. “Toad” relates the suffering created by hundreds of thousands of returning refugees, and stories from the 1950s confront the catastrophes of the Korean War and the problematic desire for autonomy. Visceral and versatile, Lost Souls is a classic work on the possibilities of transition, showcasing the innovation and craftsmanship of a consummate—and widely celebrated— storyteller.

MY FATHER I’ve heard various stories about the March 1 Independence Movement; some of them more than once, from my father. But when I finally considered jotting something down about them, I thought I should refresh my memory, and with that in mind I decided to pay him a visit. On my way to the Samch’ong-dong home I tried to recall this story and that one, stories I had heard him tell. . . .

The fi rst story that came to mind took place when my father was twenty-seven. One early-winter day he and An Sehwan went to what was then known as Pyongyang Catholic Hospital to visit Namgang Yi Sunghun. Teacher Namgang was not ill but had had himself admitted on the basis of a nonexistent malady so he would have a place to meet privately with his comrades. Teacher Namgang had asked An to fi nd a few young men who would commit themselves to the independence movement, and Father was one of them. At the time he was teaching the upper grades of Sungdok School. The task given him by Teacher Namgang for March 1 was to distribute the Korean flag and copies of the Declaration of Independence to the throngs of people who would come to Pyongyang for the March 3 funeral for King Kojong. He then was to lead these people in cheers of “Mansei!” (It had been decided that in Pyongyang the funeral ceremony would take place on the athletic field at Sungdok School.)

The fi rst thing Father did was select activist students from the upper grades and station them at various places downtown to distribute the declaration and the fl ag. He told them not to hesitate, if detained by the police, to say that they were acting on the instructions of a teacher named Hwang, and he added that the tolling of the bell at Changdatchae Chapel would be their signal to begin.

This plan proved successful. At Sungdok School, meanwhile, other selected students each took responsibility for a row of people, and the distribution was so well coordinated it took place virtually in the blink of an eye. Then the Declaration of Independence was read aloud, after which everyone began shouting “Mansei!” at the top of his lungs. Plainclothes police were present but didn’t dare

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lift a hand. The assembly then split up into several groups who went downtown by various routes. By then downtown had erupted in a sea of “Mansei!” cheers. But the following day Father found himself in jail. When I fi rst heard this story about Father I was in middle school, and I was quite moved—probably more so at that age—by the scene I imagined of the students on March 1 hearing the tolling of the bell and bravely running down this street and that, each holding close to his chest the Korean fl ag and a copy of the Declaration of Independence.

These two men, Teacher Namgang and An Sehwan, I had seen in person. Teacher Namgang passed away when I was in middle school, year four I think it was. His will made it known that he wanted his cremated remains to rest in the specimen room of the school he had established, Osan Middle School—but even a request such as this was met with rejection from the Japanese administration, and that made our young student hearts boil over in anger. I saw Teacher Namgang during the one term I studied at Osan Middle School as a fi rst-year student. At that time, even though he had been succeeded as principal, he came to school without fail every other day. Small of stature, with white hair and beard, he always wore traditional attire.

He also had sideburns, about an inch long. You might almost say he was pretty. Quite a few times I wondered that a man’s appearance could become so graceful as he aged.

And Teacher Namgang had a way of making what he said genuinely interesting. Now and then he would use assembly period to say that he intended to establish a two-year college at Osan, a place for young men and women, and what a thrill that gave us.

But when this gentle teacher got angry, it was unbelievable. Once, during a school intergrade sports competition, the teacher in charge of scoring mistakenly placed the fi fth graders higher than the fourth graders in the fi nal standings. The students at this school were already notorious for boycotting classes, and everybody was talking about how this incident would lead to a boycott as well. It was a situation in which none of the teachers dared open his mouth. And then Teacher Namgang appeared. He gathered the students and launched right into them: “You rascals, if you intend to boycott, it has to be for

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an important reason—a boycott over a scoring mistake is just plain stupid!” This wasn’t so much a scolding by a teacher to his students as it was grandfatherly or fatherly advice. The students could no more have oppose their teacher than they could have their father or grandfather—and this was not the fi rst such instance.

As for An Sehwan, I can remember the rare occasions he visited our home when I was in my fi rst two years of middle school. I’m pretty sure he had visited us before. But by the time I had started middle school he was not always in his right mind—the outcome of the various tortures he’d suffered in jail. Summer and winter alike, he went around in the same auburn-colored coat. That coat is clearer in my memory than his face—though it’s equally clear to me that in spite of the damage to his psyche, his face was neither wicked-looking nor frightening. The coat was worn out, as you might expect. When he arrived at our home he simply came inside rather than asking fi rst if the master was in. He liked pickled garlic, and whenever he appeared, my mother always served him this dish. He was a man of few words. As soon as Father saw him he would inquire after his family, and would receive in reply a simple “They’re getting along.” I don’t believe I ever saw him initiate a conversation. His home was in Sun’an. When his mind was reasonably clear he would go home, but when he was not himself he would leave, and at those times it was always our house to which he came. He would enter and seat himself without a word, accept the meal tray that Mother prepared for him, and then disappear as silently as he had arrived. I can’t recall when it was that he passed on. I would have to ask Father in more detail about this gentleman.

But as you might suspect, the stories that really interested me during my boyhood were the ones about my father’s imprisonment.

I was forever hearing bits and pieces of these stories. And whenever I heard them, something invariably came to mind—the straw hat, or rather the half of it that remained, that occupied a shelf in our dark, cramped storage room until I was in third or fourth grade.

That hat was woven during the year and a half Father spent in Sodaemun Prison in Seoul. The stories also involved Pak In-gwan, a minister who, like Father, was imprisoned after the March 1

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movement (and who I believe might still be living in a locality called Kiyang). One story was that Father’s job in prison was to weave those hats, and upon his release he was given five won that he had earned in this way. Of that amount, he gave two won to a fellow prisoner released the same day, for travel expenses, and by the time he arrived in Pyongyang only seventy chon was left. Another story concerned the prisoners who glued cigarette packets together. They used the glue sparingly and then ate what was left over. And then there was the story about how pairs of men shared the same bedding, which scarcely covered both, and when in winter they were awakened by the cold, each man would try to cover the other before himself.

And the story of how Father and Pastor Pak had such a bad case of scabies that no amount of itching would help, and when they squeezed out the discharge from the bumps, they would help each other with the hard-to-reach places, and the cell was so cold that the squeezedout discharge practically froze.

Sharing the cell with Father and Pastor Pak were two other ideological prisoners, both young men. One had been apprehended in a village in the southern provinces for reasons related to the March 1 uprising, and the other, also working in the independence movement, was based in Manchuria and had been captured there. The southerner was the youngest of the four, from a farming village, and the calluses on his palms were hard as nails. He must have had the toughest skin, because he alone didn’t develop scabies and he held up best under the beatings by the guards. The young man from Manchuria frequently sang a song about An Chunggun, the martyr executed at Yosun Prison, and he taught it to the other three. Although they initially sang the song to themselves, it wasn’t long before they warmed up to it and sang it in a loud chorus, after which they were summoned one by one by the guards and each given a terrific beating. My father still remembers that song: Bright moon shining on lone mountain, Cuckoo crying in the deep of night Till throat bleeds dry and moonlight wanes.

Tell me, cuckoo, are you the soul

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Of he who is ever mindful Of his native land?

When I arrived, Father put aside the newspaper he was reading, asked me how the grandchildren were doing, then removed his reading glasses. Mother was ill, lying on the warmer part of the heated floor, a moistened towel wrapped around her forehead. She looked up as I entered. “You aren’t feeling well?” I asked her. She said she was fi ne and expressed her concern about my family and me, asking if the children were well and how they were getting along.

Father said in an undertone that Mother was having her dizzy spells again; it had been several days now. Practically every year when winter set in she was susceptible to the cold drafts. There was no mystery about this recurring ailment, for she was almost sixty and in recent days had been up in the hills behind Samch’ong-dong gathering the leaves and branches used to heat the room. But never did she complain that her hardships had come about because I had brought her to Seoul to live.

What a fi ne son I had turned out to be, so enamored of Seoul that I had uprooted my parents from the ancestral home and dragged them here, and now look at me! For their part, Father and Mother made sure that this fi ne child of theirs understood that when times were difficult it was even more important to do the right thing.

And here this fi ne child was proposing to turn out some fi ne writing. So I began to question Father: “Can you tell me why Teacher An was tortured more than Teacher Namgang, until it broke him brutally?”

Father readily responded: “Mainly it had to do with him representing a group of people and making a statement of their views to the Japa nese government.”

“Did the mental problems start after he got out of prison? Or while he was there?”

“While he was there. And that’s what got him paroled.”

Father had once told me that the March 1 movement had to do with President Wilson’s Doctrine of Self-Determination of Nations, but the larger issue was Koreans’ increasing resentment under

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Japa nese military rule, and in this light it seems obvious that Teacher An’s breakdown resulted from his torture as an ideological criminal by the police, who were instrumental in that rule. Because Father had been forced to witness Teacher An’s torture, I thought I would try to get a more detailed account from him, but before I could ask, Father spoke up.

“You know, a couple of days ago,” he began in his P’yongan-accented speech, putting his glasses back on and staring off into space, “I went downtown, and on my way home, in Anguk-dong, I saw someone coming my way. I’ve never been one to examine everybody I see when I’m out and about, but this person was examining me. He passed by, and then someone called out to me, and I turned to see a country fellow in a fur cap pulled low over his face, wearing a coat that had seen better days. I wondered who he might be, and he asked me if my family name was Hwang and said he was Kim So-and-so, and perhaps I remembered him? I couldn’t place him, and I told him so. Well, what do you know? He said he was Kim So-and-so who was in Sodaemun Prison with me in 1919 because of the independence movement, and didn’t I recognize him? And that’s when it hit me—he was the young fellow from down south, the one who was the youngest of us four. I took his hand, and when I saw all the calluses I knew it was him, sure enough. And after a close-up look at the dark face with all the lines beneath the fur cap, I could see, clear as day, the way he looked back then. . . . There was a place to eat right close by, so we went inside and caught up on everything. He got around to telling me that the reason he was in Seoul was the UN trusteeship matter. Said that where he was in the country it was hard to get a good grip on the issue—he didn’t know whether he should be for it or against it. So fi rst he would get it clear in his mind, and then he’d go and educate the folks back home. One thing was for sure, he said—Jap-style military rule should never again be allowed on our land. Lately he kept coming back to thoughts about the March 1 movement, and it got to the point where he felt he had to come to Seoul. And once he was here, it was only natural that memories of our prison experience had come to mind along with all the rest. So when he saw me on the street he knew right away who I was. . . . He’s

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got plenty of white around the ears. But there’s such a nice glow to that wrinkled, sun-darkened face of his, and then the way he talks and thinks, it makes him look so young, and him looking young made me feel younger myself.�

The way my father told this story made me forget for the moment what I was going to ask him. As I observed him, hair half white and half dark, I felt as if he too was the kind of man who aged gracefully.

February 1947