Maninbo Page 4

  His fatherland,

  the Korean peninsula

  where the sea on three sides can never be calm,

  was always the land he dreamed of.

  He passed fifty,

  sixty,

  seventy.

  With reality so bleak, even dreaming was hard.

  He rejected all honors.

  Belief was his only politics.

  Even a 40-watt light in a dreary cell

  was an utterly vain dream to him

  each day when he awoke.

  He was no reality, he was a legend.

  As if modern history were ancient history,

  Jeong Hwa-am endured, white-haired.

  The Shit Clan

  I have three surnames.

  In this land

  where changing surnames is one of the greatest humiliations,

  I have three or four surnames.

  In Japan there is a surname Gui,

  meaning ghost,

  often therefore changed into the wife’s family name.

  My case has nothing to do with such customs.

  However, my family name can be Kim,

  or Nam

  or sometimes Jang.

  Yet I am no swindler.

  Not content with those names, anyway,

  I adopt my mother’s surname Ko

  and am sometimes called Ko.

  Once I got dreadfully drunk

  and fell into an old-style latrine,

  after which I was Bun,

  meaning Shit.

  Until the 1970s, some eccentrics from the late Joseon period

  continued to live with various names like this,

  which meant that life was never boring.

  My family name was Shit.

  The Long-Term Guest at the Dabok Inn in Dadong

  Jin Dal-ho

  was a man with plans, great or shaky,

  who sold his lands in Jeong-eup in North Jeolla

  and came up to Seoul.

  Though born to the fields,

  his body as a whole

  was in good shape,

  no need for a carpenter to ply his inked cord.

  His lips were always fresh,

  and when he washed up in the morning

  he never gave a damn about others in the queue.

  He washed his neck,

  behind his ears, beneath his ears,

  the ridge of his nose,

  even his chest beneath his undervest, two or three times.

  He soaped for a long time,

  and rinsed off the foam for a long time, too.

  Only then did he say: Now I feel alive, I can enjoy my food.

  Yet day after day nothing worked out

  and he stayed at the Dabok Inn as a long-term guest

  for over a year.

  His notebook held

  the President’s phone number,

  some National Assemblyman’s phone number,

  even the switchboard at Midopa department store,

  each compactly set down,

  but day after day nothing worked out.

  All he could manage was

  to seduce the woman working at the inn

  and make love to her at night.

  Three Feet of Rotten Rope

  In Yeongdong, North Chungcheong province,

  nobody cared about the Yushin Reforms or anything else.

  There was one man who took care of all the village’s unpleasant jobs

  such as renting a room for gamblers,

  laying out the body if someone died,

  castrating a pig,

  mating cows or horses.

  That was No Bong-gu.

  So poor that the roof of his house rotted into furrows,

  but always warm-hearted

  like the fire in a brazier.

  In the winter when it was too cold to move,

  and children walked with short, quick steps,

  red-nosed,

  he would shelter them from the wind, saying:

  ‘Ah, you must be cold!’

  But he was so poor that finally his children were starving.

  Somehow he got hold of three yards of rotten straw rope,

  tied it to a tree

  and hanged himself.

  Or rather, pretended to hang himself,

  not intending to die.

  Once they got wind of that,

  the villagers gathered grain

  so he and his children could survive

  the winter.

  ‘No, it would never do for him to die.

  Who would do the hard work

  in our village,

  in the neighbouring villages,

  if not No Bong-gu?’

  A Night in Mugyo-dong

  The food was seasoned with deep-red pepper powder.

  The red pepper that people began to eat

  from the late Joseon period

  is like something Koreans have eaten since ancient times.

  You only have to take a bite,

  ahh,

  a fire kindles in the mouth.

  The drinkers’ delight in 1960s and 70s Seoul

  was to empty ten bottles of strong soju

  alongside such hot –

  and salty – side-dishes,

  when it was already eleven at night, nearly curfew time.

  Why did they have to be so tough?

  Around that time everything used to get exaggerated.

  Even Park Jung-hee got exaggerated,

  so that he shrank to bean-size.

  If someone shouted

  that brat Park Jung-hee,

  that brat was even using his daughter as First Lady,

  and so on,

  that gave him authority

  and the friends who had come with him would pay for the drinks.

  One day I picked up a scrap of newspaper

  off the cement floor of that kind of bar

  and first learned about the self-immolation of the young worker Jeon Tae-il.

  The Time It Takes to Piss

  There were plenty of prisoners in Daegu prison with long or life terms.

  One of the long-term prisoners

  with a stiff white beard

  looked out into the corridor

  and questioned a green youth who had just come from trial.

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘One year two months.’

  ‘Hell, call that a sentence?

  That’s the time it takes a lifer to piss.

  Hey, how can that be called a sentence?’

  Jang Gwang-seop, with his one year two months,

  was nicknamed Muhammad Ali.

  Even when he got a thrashing from a guard,

  he would brush himself off, stand up as if nothing had happened,

  and calmly walk away.

  This Ali Jang Gwang-seop

  was one of the descendants of Jeong Mong-ju,

  who stayed loyal to Goryeo to the bitter end

  and wrote a last poem before he was killed.

  The poem began:

  ‘Though I die

  and die again a hundred times…’

  An Old Prison Officer

  Starting as an errand boy in Gyeongseong jail

  long ago during the Japanese colonial period,

  he became assistant guard,

  then guard,

  the lowest rank of prison officer,

  for forty-seven years in all.

  His work was tying the ropes

  and fastening the handcuffs

  of those going out for morning sessions,

  for interrogations by the prosecution or for trial in court.

  His pock-marked face was dark

  and his eyes looked as though he had not eaten for three days.

  His gold-rimmed hat

  sat a little too heavily on him.

  When convoy vehicles numbers one and two left early in the morning,

  he went along as escort.

&
nbsp; In the evenings, as a substitute guard,

  he would go peeking into this cell and that,

  and if the prisoners kindly offered him

  fallen apples or

  rice cakes they had bought,

  he would take them without hesitation,

  with not a word of thanks, saying:

  ‘This rice cake is made with wheat flour,

  and coated with soy bean powder.’

  For meals he made do with prison food.

  When he went home, he did nothing but catch up on his sleep

  because he always had triple shift overtime.

  That’s why he told the prisoners:

  ‘No lifer has anything on me, you know.’

  The Person in Charge of Detention Cells at

  Seodaemun Police Station

  In winter it was like the outdoors.

  He was the man with hair cut short

  in charge of detention cells at Seodaemun police station in the 1970s.

  He never got promoted.

  Every time someone came in,

  every time several came in,

  surely they had some fault,

  and he would find it,

  would kick, kick hard,

  to depress their spirits from the start.

  Im Cheol-man.

  But after meals

  he would turn to the women’s cell

  and demand a song.

  If someone sang a song such as,

  ‘I will build a house like one in a picture,’

  a storm of applause would pour

  from the men’s cell.

  Then it would be the turn of the men’s cell.

  If someone jailed for a first burglary after three larcenies

  sang ‘Camellia Girl’…

  Im Cheol-man would scream:

  ‘You lout,

  shame on you, you, a man, acting so pathetic.’

  A perpetual guard,

  he once said in prayerful tones:

  ‘Just one time

  these cells

  were completely empty

  and I was really very bored.

  ‘Yet my wish

  is to be in charge of completely empty cells

  with nobody coming in.

  Hey, you bastard in cell two,

  can’t you just listen quietly to what I’m saying?

  Bastard.’

  VOLUME 12

  Colette, No Jeong-hye

  Colette,

  born in Lyons, France,

  joined an active sisterhood.

  Her younger sister first worked in Vietnam, now lives in Japan.

  Colette came to Seoul decades ago.

  Her Korean is fluent,

  her stomach’s accustomed to Korean food.

  Even without cheese,

  this is her country.

  How holy! How amazing!

  to have arrived at such intense unity.

  Her Korean name is No Jeong-hye.

  Secretly, she contributed much to the Korean human rights movement,

  starting with the National Democratic Students’ Federation incident,

  or even before.

  She circulated petitions,

  collected donations,

  hid people,

  even promised to hide me.

  Her heart’s a wide plain.

  She made her nest in a Sillim-dong slum,

  lived in great poverty.

  She reckoned a bowl of instant noodles was a feast.

  She alone is reason enough why there has to be religion.

  A Blind Man by Saetgang River

  No one noticed

  how salty it had become,

  that river

  in Sorae, Gyeonggi Province.

  Seo Pil-seok cannot see

  that river.

  Blind,

  he lost his sight some time ago.

  At high tide

  when rising waters advance to the top of the bank,

  his back aches.

  He hurt his back long ago in the war,

  wounded on the central front.

  At low tide

  his belly aches,

  a problem from long working in that salt farm

  where he ended up after discharge.

  Later, he lost his sight.

  First he had something like cataracts

  and the things he saw grew hazier day by day,

  until finally he could see nothing.

  He thought he’d go mad in that merciless darkness.

  Time seems to have been a serum even for that darkness.

  He grew resigned,

  life a fluttering tent

  even for a sightless body.

  Today, too,

  high tide and low tide depend on the moon.

  Old Seo Pil-seok is more a man of the moon

  than a man

  of the earth.

  Muttering

  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…

  Dr Jang Gi-ryeo

  ‘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.

  Three-headed Hawk

  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.

  Kim Geun-tae

  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.

  Jei Jeong-gu