I realized I didn’t keep my promise.
A letter from Yunsu arrived at Aunt Monica’s convent the following week, before our second visit to see him at the Seoul Detention Center. Aunt Monica was stubbornly intent on going, regardless of whether he agreed to see us or not. The old year had ended; it was 1997.
Aunt Monica looked ecstatic as she handed me the letter. As for me, I was beginning to think that I wanted to face him for a different reason. Was that because I was sensing that the person I really wanted to face was myself? I still can’t say.
I completely forgot that I wrote Sister Monica a letter a long time ago and told her I wanted to meet that singer, the one who won Daehak Gayoje and sang the national anthem at the opening ceremony for a baseball game in 1986. My little brother, who’s no longer with us, loved her voice. He was really fond of the national anthem. I thought that if I could tell him I met her, he would feel happy up there in heaven. But I didn’t recognize her when she came that day. When I got out of solitary, I was feeling hopeless again and wanted to destroy everything and end it all. After I got back to my cell, though, I thought, my little brother wouldn’t have liked how rude I was. I used to think that everything ends when you die, but now I think I might be wrong about that. I’m sorry. Also, the long underwear you gave me is very warm.
It was a short letter. Aunt Monica was in a hurry to get to the detention center. She couldn’t very well show up without me—the one-time singer, the one he said his brother had liked, the motivation behind that letter. We waited for Officer Yi to come meet us at the entrance, and the three of us walked into the detention center together.
“When I met you last time,” said Officer Yi, “I wasn’t sure if it was really you. I’m excited to meet you. I was a huge fan back in school. When I was taking Yunsu back to his cell, he told me you were that famous singer who sang Toward the Land of Hope. It’s such an honor.”
Every now and then, when I was walking down the street, or applying for a credit card at a department store, or boarding a plane, people would recognize my name or face. Around ten years ago, I had performed a song called Toward the Land of Hope. The records flew off the shelves like they had sprouted wings, and I did appearances anywhere and everywhere I was called. Now, ten years later, I didn’t mind being recognized. But I wasn’t so sure I liked being recognized at a detention center.
“I told my wife that you came with Sister Monica. She was so impressed. She said you’re such a good person. She said she knew you were glamorous but didn’t know you did good things as well.”
As far as I was concerned, I was never going back to that prison again once the month was up, and I was far from being a good person, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to say, Well, this is what really happened. I didn’t know what to say. If he was going to keep it up, then I would have no choice but to act like a good person. It would take too long to explain to him why I wasn’t who he thought I was.
“By the way,” I said, changing the subject, “why are some inmates wearing light-blue uniforms and others are wearing dark blue? The dark-blue ones look cold.”
“The dark-blue uniforms are provided by the state, but they can buy the light-blue ones for themselves.”
“It’s so cold. Why don’t they buy the warmer ones? Are they expensive?” Since there wasn’t really anything else to talk about while walking down that long hallway, I kept asking him questions.
“They cost twenty-thousand won.”
“That’s not that expensive.”
Officer Yi looked at me as if he were taken aback.
“We have four thousand inmates here,” he said. “We check their commissary accounts periodically. There are usually about five hundred who don’t have a single cent for half a year at a time.”
I stopped and stared up at him.
“It makes sense,” he said. “They made their living off of crime, so now they have nothing. In those cases, we have to assume they also have no family. Or that their families have turned their backs on them.”
“Five hundred without a single cent?”
“There are just as many who have less than a thousand won for six months. But think about it. Why would people with money wind up in here?”
I thought about how much I had spent on liquor at the department store a few days ago. I felt like saying, But when I was in Paris, the plazas were packed with more and more Korean tourists every day, and every summer, the other Korean students and I would joke about how we had to head for the countryside to get away from them. I assumed Korea was wealthy because all those tourists refused to stay anywhere but five-star hotels… But I kept my mouth shut. Five hundred people with less than a thousand won to their names, for six months or more at a time. How were they able to buy toilet paper and long underwear? As I followed Aunt Monica down the hallway, I felt as if my feet weren’t touching the floor.
We passed a short, bald man dressed in a light-blue uniform walking in the custody of a prison guard. Just as I noticed that he also had a red tag on his uniform, he stopped and said, “Sister Monica.”
Aunt Monica said, “Look who it is!” and hugged him. They looked like an aunt and her nephew greeting each other after a long time apart.
“I heard you met Jeong Yunsu.”
“Word gets around fast. How have you been?”
“We don’t have any secrets from each other in here. My sister is here to see me. I’m on my way to meet her. But how is Yunsu? He must be in pretty bad shape after solitary. Is he giving you a hard time? Don’t give up on him, Sister. Just think about the first time you met me, how I used to scream and cuss at you.” The inmate laughed bashfully.
“That’s true,” Aunt Monica said. “You were a handful.”
“Sister, someone told me his accomplice framed him. He must have made a false confession. That accomplice of his, I heard his family is rich. He only got fifteen years, and now he’s been transferred to Wonju. None of the guards like Yunsu, but we think he’s a good kid. You know that money you put in his commissary account? There’s an elderly man here who’s serving a life sentence. Yunsu gave all of his money to him. The old man had nothing in his account, so he couldn’t even get proper medicine. But Yunsu told him to use the money to get medicine from outside the prison if he had to. It’s hard for Yunsu, too, to get by without any money.”
“Is that so?” Aunt Monica’s face brightened.
“I bumped into him yesterday in the prison yard, and he asked me if I had a Bible. So I loaned him one right away. I did good, didn’t I, Sister?”
“Yes, you did. You did really well, my boy.”
Aunt Monica patted him on the back, and he beamed proudly, like a child. I watched him and my aunt from a few steps away and thought, Is that really a death row convict who has killed people? There was no end to the unexpected and surprising. Not in this place.
“By the way, did Father Kim get that operation?”
“Yes, he did. That’s what I heard.”
The inmate’s round eyes darkened.
“Me and the other guys on death row were talking about it the last time we were together. We decided to pray. We prayed to God to take those of us with more sins first, instead of him. What did he do to deserve it? We also decided not to each lunch until his cancer goes away. We wanted to make a sacrifice. We found out that he kept coming here to offer us Mass right up until the day of his surgery. He never said anything to us about it.”
His eyes were wet with tears. Aunt Monica bit her lip.
“That would be an enormous sacrifice for you to make. Eating must be your only pleasure in here… A great pleasure and a diversion… Thank you. I’ll tell Father Kim about it. God, too, will look favorably upon you for giving up your lunches. Keep up your promise to Him, but make sure you sneak in some snacks from outside. I’ll take the blame for that one and ask Him for forgiveness.”
The inmate laughed out loud. The guard who was with him looked uncomfortable.
“I should get going,” the inmate said. He started to walk away, his hands shackled and the tips of his ears red with frostbite just like Yunsu’s, but he turned suddenly and said, “Officer, wait! Sister, I miss you. Sometimes I miss you more than I miss my real sister. Even more than I miss my mother, who passed away when I was young. Come see me. I’ll write to you.”
There wasn’t even the slightest trace of pretense to his words. Was that the power of someone facing an impending death? When I saw how easily, how like a child, he said the words that I was too embarrassed to say, I was struck by the feeling that he, not I, was Aunt Monica’s true kin. And, to my surprise, I felt a little jealous. For a moment, I wondered, if I were Aunt Monica, whom would I have cared about more, me or them? Had they hogged the love that I should have been receiving while squandering my life for the past thirty years? When they cried out, begging to be left alone to die, did Aunt Monica cry, too, and cling to them the way she did with me, and say, You poor thing, you poor thing?
The inmate was led away by the guard. Aunt Monica paused in her steps and sighed heavily, as if it was too much to bear, and muttered to herself, “I wish I had three bodies, or that I could just move in here and live with them.”
We waited for Yunsu again in the Catholic meeting room. Unlike on my first bewildering visit, this time, I felt like I had come armed with a well-honed knife. When I thought about the fact that I was meeting the type of man who had raped and killed a young girl of seventeen, the desire to die went away and a strange will to fight surged up in me. My whole body was trembling with electricity, but I didn’t mind the feeling. Even if it was just hatred, and even if there were an evil intent to my observing him, it had been a very long time since any kind of desire had welled up inside me. When I had woken that morning, profanities that I had never before uttered were buzzing inside my mouth. An unfamiliar pleasure seemed to have raised my body temperature a degree. I felt like I had been looking forward to this day with the heart of a trapper awaiting a snared animal. Maybe I had finally started to realize that the murderous impulse I had been pointing at myself all that time was actually intended for someone else.
“They’re all like that at first,” Aunt Monica said. “But Yunsu is a little bit better. There used to be one here named Kim Daedu. He was the so-called serial killer of his generation. He tore up ten different Bibles given to him by a pastor. But when he died, he turned to God and went like an angel. Then there was the Geumdang murder case. What was his name? That one spent his final years living like Buddha. And the one you just saw in the hallway cursed up a storm and refused to come into the room the first time the guard brought him.”
“No wonder you come here,” I said.
My words must have sounded barbed. Aunt Monica stared at me incredulously, as if she had felt their sting.
“You like it when sinners turn into angels. You and the other clergy members wave the word of God like a magic wand and see how it changes people, and that makes you feel godlier, right? There’s nothing weird about that. From where they stand, they could die at any time, so of course they’re afraid. They weren’t afraid when they killed another human being, but now that it’s their turn to die, they’re scared, so they turn good as fast as they can. I guess the death penalty is a good thing. Everyone gets a little bit nicer when they’re facing death. Like you told the guard last time, it really is the best way to rehabilitate them.”
Aunt Monica slit her eyes at me. I stared back at her at first, unwilling to back down either. But people’s faces, and the eyes especially, contain so many stories. They say so much more than any number of words can. Aunt Monica seemed to be saying, Think about your father when he died. Think about the tantrum your mother threw right before her operation. Most of all, think about yourself when you decided to commit suicide and end your own life. Being human does not mean that we change in the face of death, her eyes told me, but because we are human, we can regret our mistakes and become new people. I couldn’t stare into those old eyes any longer–those small and wrinkled, yet dark and impenetrable eyes–and I dropped my gaze.
Because of our argument, I wound up flustered and unprepared when Yunsu came in behind the guard. While Aunt Monica was taking him by the hand and welcoming him in, I was trying to remind myself of the humiliating fact that a murderer who raped a young girl had watched in thrall as I sang the national anthem at a baseball game. I thought about how I had ground my teeth all night because there was no reason scum like him might not have jerked off to the pictures of me that were printed in magazines back in my pop star days. But something kept blunting my anger. I couldn’t erase those stories from my mind: five hundred without a single cent and just as many with less than a thousand won in their accounts; making do with less than a thousand won for six months; a man on death row fasting until a priest was healed; his saying that God should take those with more sins instead; Yunsu giving all of the money Aunt Monica had given him to an elderly prisoner serving a life sentence… Every last grain of those millet-sized words rolled toward me like a gathering ball of snow and blotted out the words rape and murder of a seventeen-year-old girl. They faced off inside of me: on one side, a snowman lying on its side; on the other, bulls readying their horns.
His face looked paler than last time. A faint but awkward smile flickered around the corners of his eyes, which had not yet entirely lost their murderous gleam. I had zero intent of cooperating in this trite parade of so-called rehabilitation that Aunt Monica had been engaged in for the last thirty years, but I also didn’t want to agonize over it. After this, there were just two more meetings, and then I would never return to this place again. I had promised her a month. Afterward, I would go to my uncle and tell him that I had met with death row inmates in accordance with Aunt Monica’s program and freed myself of the neurosis of death while spreading the Gospel to them. Then my uncle would be happy. Because he was a good man. And because it was so easy to fool good people. The less they deceive others, the more they think others never deceive them. But I wasn’t sure if he was going to stare right back at me and say, I wish you would cry. If he did, then I would tell him I was sorry. Sorry, because, in any case, my uncle was a good man.
Just like last time, the four of us, including the guard, sat in the Catholic meeting room. Aunt Monica took out the pastries she had brought and set them on the table. And just like last time, she put one in Yunsu’s hands, and he hunched over to take a bite. Since he always had his hands bound like that, whether sleeping or eating or going to the toilet, I thought it was not unreasonable to think death might be preferable.
“Did you stay out of solitary this time?” Aunt Monica asked.
He stopped in the middle of chewing and hesitated. Officer Yi spoke for him and said, “He took it easy this week.” The two of them laughed. Yunsu laughed, too, but only briefly.
“Thank goodness. Don’t go back there, Yunsu. It’s no good for you or for anyone else. But most of all, it’s hard on you.”
He ate the pastry without saying anything. The look on his face said that the meeting would be too difficult to get through if it weren’t for the pastries. Aunt Monica sat close to him and touched his frostbitten ear. He grimaced from the pain.
“Poor thing. I brought you two blankets so you can bundle up at night.” Aunt Monica clucked her tongue and mumbled to herself, “Those judges and prosecutors should try spending a few nights in those unheated cells. Must be so cold.”
Yunsu swallowed a bite of pastry and coughed. Aunt Monica picked up his coffee and brought it to his lips. He reared his head back shyly.
“Drink it. It’s okay. If I’d married and had children, you would be about the age of my youngest. I wish we could unshackle you, but we can’t. It must be so hard. You’re holding up well, though. If you can endure this place, then you can endure any place.”
To my surprise, Yunsu obediently replied, “Yes, ma’am.” Aunt Monica carefully fed him the coffee as if she were giving milk to a baby. He drank the coffee she offered him just as a baby would. But he looked like he was in agony. I don’t think he could have looked more pained if I had been holding a piece of burning charcoal to his head.
“I got the books you sent me,” he said.
“You did? Did you read them?”
“Yes. I mean, I didn’t have anything else to do, and I was glad they weren’t Bibles.”
Aunt Monica laughed heartily. She seemed to have no intention of telling him what the other inmate had told her.
“That’s right,” she said, considerably more relaxed than the last time we had visited. “Don’t read the Bible. Stay away from it.”
“That’s… the first time anyone has said that to me.”
“I know you won’t read it even if I tell you to, so what’s the point of wasting my breath? So, even if you feel like reading it, resist the urge!”
Aunt Monica laughed. He laughed along with her. The half-eaten pastry was still in his hand.
After a moment, he said hesitantly, “The judge sent me a Christmas card.”
“The judge? You mean Justice Kim Sejung? The one who presided over your case?”
“Yes.”
“Oh really?”
“The card said, ‘As a judge, I sentenced you to death, but as a human being, I pray for you.’”
He cleared his throat. I wondered if some judges were really that nice. It seemed like a kind thing to say.
“What did you think about that?” Monica asked, her face brightening.
“When I got the card, I thought… To be honest, I thought, ‘Why is everyone acting so nice all of a sudden?’”
He let out a long laugh that sounded like a tire going flat. He looked scornful. While I was thinking that it made perfect sense and was not at all clichéd, Aunt Monica was biting her lip and staring at him.
“It’s weird,” he said. “Right before the judge sentenced me, he asked me how I felt. So I told him I felt good. I could hear the reporters and the other people in the courtroom start whispering about that. I told him I knew I was going to get the death penalty, so I was glad that the state would kill me since I never managed to do it myself all those years, and I said that no one had ever paid any attention to me my whole life, so it felt good to have them scrutinizing my every move now. After I was placed on death row, the registrar told me to pick one: P, B, or C? I asked him what he meant, and he explained that the prison had to assign a clergy member to all death row inmates. P, B, and C meant Protestant, Buddhist, and Catholic. He said the other inmates pick either church or temple and attend services for a year or so, but I said no. I said it shouldn’t be like separating trash into plastic, bottles, or cans.”
“That’s right! It shouldn’t!” Aunt Monica chimed in. He looked at her for a moment in surprise and then kept talking.
“After you told me last time that meeting with you didn’t mean I had to convert, I did a lot of thinking. To be honest, I don’t need religion. I don’t believe in it, either. I’ve lived fine until now without it. Well, no, I haven’t been fine. I’ve lived like a dog, actually. But if there really were a God, a God of love and justice, then I wouldn’t have turned out to be a murderer.”
He swallowed hard and continued.
“A long time ago, I went to a Catholic service. It was after my little brother died and I was in jail again for maybe the third time. Probably about five years ago. I said I wanted to be baptized and was taking catechism classes. I liked it because the women who volunteered there treated us really nicely. They wrote us letters and gave us Bibles. They even brought Choco Pies and gave us good things to eat on holidays. One day, after Mass ended, an elderly death row inmate who was sitting next to me grabbed the hand of one of the volunteers. He did it before the guards could stop him. I saw the look on her face when that happened. That look said, I will feed you, I will give you some money, and I will come to this prison in the dead of winter and hold Mass for you, but I will not hold your hand. She didn’t say the words out loud, but the look on her face was clear to me and to that inmate and to everyone around us. She looked like she was looking at a bug or a filthy beast that wasn’t even the same species as her. That night, I heard that old man crying like an animal and raging in the cell next to mine.”
He sneered again.
Officer Yi interrupted. “They don’t have that many opportunities to see other people, so they’re much more sensitive to outsiders.”
“That person, that so-called sister, probably went home and told everyone that she does volunteer work for the unfortunate. She probably thought she was a pretty good person. But she has no idea how badly she sinned against that old man. He may have taken someone’s life, but she trampled on his soul. He’s slowly dying in here day after day. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to go to another Mass. I made up my mind then that if you’re not one of us, then you better not talk to us and pretend that you care about us. It sickens me more than being looked down on or getting beat up. Since then, I’ve stopped trusting people who have money. We live in two different worlds. And even if there is a God, that God only watches out for the rich. He doesn’t live here with us, and He doesn’t so much as glance at people like us. Whenever I saw another churchgoer, I just wanted to throw up. They’re all hypocrites.”
No one spoke for a moment. I studied him carefully so as not to miss the expressions that crossed his face. He seemed like he had calmed down a lot since last time. If the looks that crossed his face then were icy, this time they were merely cool. I imagined him holding a knife. Then I tried to picture him lifting the skirt of a scrawny seventeen-year-old girl and raping her. But the actors in my head would not play their roles properly and just sat there vacant-eyed. I couldn’t stay angry.
“I’m so sorry,” Aunt Monica said, grabbing his shackled hands.
“Sister, it wasn’t you,” he said and tried to pull his hands free.
“No, but it could have been. It doesn’t matter who that woman was, she was still me. It was my fault. Yunsu, I apologize for her. I’m sorry, too, about the other man. When I think of how your heart must have ached to listen to him crying all night, my heart aches, too. I’m sorry for not paying any attention to you all those years, wherever you were in the world, and for waiting so long to come see you.”
He stared incredulously at her for a moment and then looked away.
“I don’t know if you’re doing this on purpose,” he said, “but you’re making me very uncomfortable. This is going to bother me all day, even after I go back to my cell. So please, don’t do this to me.”
He clamped his lips together and struggled to pull his hands free from her grasp. But Aunt Monica held on stubbornly with tears in her eyes. He was not the only one who would continue to be bothered by this. I was angry. I muttered to myself, “What a great way to rehabilitate someone. Let’s raise the flag high and pledge allegiance to it, then sing the national anthem while we’re at it.” I couldn’t look at them anymore and turned my head away. There was the Rembrandt again. When I saw it, I was reminded of a passage by my favorite writer, Jang Jeongil: “We must kill the prodigal son. He brings worse things with him. Nothing makes us feel quite so small as the son who has returned. The true prodigal son must go, with nary a drop of water nor a crumb of bread, without even a camel, he must go to the ends of the desert and die there. And not just there, but everywhere!”
He was right. I hated hypocrites. It was better that Yunsu remain a murderer, beautifully, to the bitter end. I wanted him to die mocking everyone, just as Gary Gilmore had before his execution in Utah. Gary Gilmore… While I was studying in France, President Mitterrand had abolished the death penalty, despite the public opinion polls that showed the majority of citizens wanted to keep it, and the political fallout was felt for a long time after. Everyone at my school in Paris talked about it, which was how I came to read the writings of people like Victor Hugo and Albert Camus, who vigorously opposed the death penalty, and how I learned about Gary Gilmore. He had shot and killed two complete strangers, and in interviews with the press, he smirked and said calmly, If you kill me, then you will be assisting me in my final murder. He was beyond the reach of the system. He mocked the incompetence and contradiction of trading a single murder for all of the violence that he had committed. Many young people wrote songs and made films in his memory after he died because of what he represented. And they weren’t clichéd about it. The shock of his execution moved us and made us think. But this trite scene playing out before me would have merely bored us and, to be honest, it would have bothered us a little, too, deep down inside. I wanted to get up and leave.