When I first started college, I joined a literary circle. Then I switched to a reading circle. Was it an underground organization? We didn’t meet in basements, but we weren’t recognized by the university, either. We met once a week in a room that a former student rented in Yaksu-dong. Her name was Cha Gwanghi, born in Gwangju. She was four years older than the rest of us. She dropped out in the middle of her studies and was staying at home. It’s not a lie! I can tell you everything about her—without hiding anything.
The books I was reading then were The Economic History of the Western World, Historical Awareness of Times of Division, Rosa Luxemburg, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. No, not “depressed” but “oppressed.” They’re not radical books, just basic texts. But they woke me up, like I had cold water splashed on my face.
How can I put it? Until then my life was like wandering around in a hazy, gray fog, and suddenly I could see there was a clear order to things.
We called her Gwanghi-hyeong, as if she were an older brother. Her room had a truly unique feeling to it. More than anything else, I think I was fascinated by the atmosphere in that room. Because from the time I was little, I always lived with my mother in a single rented room, so I never had a room of my own. In Gwanghi-hyeong’s room there were thick black curtains, bouquets of dried flowers, and a mask from the Hahoe mask dance. Above the desk, there were two photos tacked to the wall. One was an African child with a swollen belly, but so skinny you could count every single rib. The other was Mother Teresa. How can I put it? This was a room that mixed polar opposites: beauty and ugliness, peace and pain. Next to the photos it said:
—Fly. Give everything up and fly away!
I wanted to know what that meant.
Gwanghi-hyeong replied with a mysterious smile,
—It’s exactly what it says. I want to be a bird.
Anyway, I liked her. I was fascinated by how she would hold a cigarette in her long, slender fingers. I was tempted to start smoking myself.
Gwanghi-hyeong suffered from terrible neuralgia. Some days it was so bad she couldn’t get up, and the rumor among ourselves—though I don’t know who started it—was that she’d been tortured by the army in 1980 during the Gwangju Uprising. There was also the story that the man she loved was killed in May that year. But she never mentioned any of that herself. Except one time.
There was a picture frame she always kept turned the other way on the corner of her desk. One day when I turned the frame around, I saw it was a photo of a young man. When I asked why she kept the picture turned away, she told me it was too painful for her to look at his face. She was smiling, but there were tears welling up in her eyes. I guess that man was her boyfriend.
Gwanghi-hyeong wasn’t really an activist. But she was more sensitive and romantic than other people. She would recite poems by Kim Su-yeong and Shin Dong-yeop. Once, in the middle of a heated discussion about what we’d read, she cried out:
—The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God’s name is Abraxas.
It was also one of my favorite passages from Demian, the well-known novel by Hermann Hesse. But a girl named Sooim said, with a serious look:
—Gwanghi-hyeong, are you still stuck on such juvenile and sentimental ideas?
Gwanghi blushed. Obviously, Sooim had hit a soft spot. She replied with a silly smile:
—You’re right. I’m still too sentimental.
Then, Sooim said, without even a change in her expression:
—If we’re flying somewhere, it’s not to some Abraxas. It’s to the people, isn’t it?
I really hated her then.
Where is Gwanghi-hyeong now? The next fall, she committed suicide. I don’t know why. No one who knew her could explain why she had to take her own life. In any case Gwanghi-hyeong never became a bird or got to fly anywhere—to Abraxas or the people. She just fell.
The central police station was a large concrete building that loomed over the small shabby street where it was located. Inspector Nam got out of the Jeep, grabbed Shinhye by the arm, and took her straight up to the second floor. At the top of the stairs was a room with a black plaque that read, Intelligence Section.
Despite the very early hour, several men were standing around the stove. No sooner had Shinhye followed Nam into the room when they walked over and examined her, eyeing her up and down with great interest.
“You’re finally here! We couldn’t wait to see what this bitch looked like.”
“Look at her! That face!”
“Yeah, gotta be pretty to get to the men in these parts.”
Shinhye reminded herself that she had to be brave. She kept her mouth closed and her eyes wide-open so as not to crumble under their scrutiny. But her eyes burned from the strain, and she felt like she was about to burst into tears.
A man in his mid-fifties sat at the desk in the middle of the room. He looked dignified in his dress uniform, and he wore glasses.
“Do you have any idea where you are?” he thundered, glaring at Shinhye. “To come crawling in without being afraid?”
He must have been the highest-ranking person in the room because Inspector Nam had immediately saluted him when they arrived.
“I only came here to earn some money,” Shinhye answered, looking him straight in the eye. “Isn’t this still the Republic of Korea, where people have the freedom to change their residence?”
She told herself it was better to seem assertive from the outset rather than humble and intimidated, like someone who might be guilty of something. She was totally mistaken.
“Come here!”
One of the men, leaning against the desk, gestured to her with a finger. He was looking at her oddly. Clearly, he was addressing her, but his eyes were directed elsewhere. She hesitantly walked over to him, and he abruptly slapped her hard across the cheek.
“You will never answer like that again! Understood?”
His tone was entirely matter-of-fact, as if nothing had happened just then. It felt like her cheek was on fire, but the slap had been so unexpected she didn’t even have time to cry out.
“Are you a communist or a socialist?” he asked. Then he repeated the question. He still seemed to be watching something a few inches off to the side of her face, but Shinhye realized he was looking at her.
“W-What do you mean?”
“Just answer the question, bitch! Are you a communist or a socialist?”
Shinhye’s cheek still burned, and his sideways-looking eyes confused her.
“Look, we already know everything. So just tell us the truth.” This time it was the man in the uniform who was sitting behind the desk.
In contrast to the other man, his voice was gentle. Shinhye wanted to ask why they were asking her questions if they already knew everything, but she kept silent for fear that they would hit her again. Maybe they actually did know something about her. She realized she didn’t exactly know the distinction between communism and socialism. And that was precisely why she had the absurd fear that she could be one or the other.
“I’m not a socialist or a communist,” she answered after a long time. Her voice lacked confidence.
“Of course, that’s what you’d say. Who ever saw a Red that admitted to being one, eh?” the wall-eyed man said with a snort. “But it won’t be long before we make that mouth of yours tell the truth. So get yourself ready.”
Shinhye knew she had to remain calm, but her body was not able to hide the fact that she was afraid. Please, she thought, desperately, if this shaking would just stop, she could defeat this fear and be courageous.
“How you’re treated here depends entirely on how you behave. So be nice and cooperate with us. Understand?” the uniformed man behind the desk said to her calmly.
“Detective Kim, you get started with the questioning. Get tough on her if she doesn’t cooperate.”
A tall man in his mid-thirties stood up and told her to follow him. She was somewhat relieved—he didn’t look mean.
He led her into the next room. It was a small space and the only furniture was four or five metal desks, a few chairs, and a rusty stove. The walls were bare, except for the slogan, Let’s Root Out the Leftist Commies in Defense of Democracy! A dangling fluorescent lamp lit up the emptiness. Kim picked up a metal chair, put it in front of a desk, and told Shinhye to sit down. He pulled a chair out for himself, sat down. He opened a drawer, took out an unopened pack of Sol cigarettes. He ripped open the pack, lit one for himself, then abruptly offered Shinhye one, too.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Don’t waste our time being modest. Smoke when we say you can smoke. It’s okay.”
“I don’t smoke. Really.”
“I hear all female students in Seoul smoke these days. Is that true? You came all the way here disguised as a café waitress, you must at least know how to smoke!”
“Not all female students smoke. And I didn’t disguise myself as a café waitress. I am a waitress.”
“A real waitress?” he snickered. He opened the desk drawer, took out a ballpoint pen and some paper, and pushed them in front of her.
“Start by writing down all the details of your life. Don’t try to hide anything.”
“I already wrote all that last night at the police station.”
“Just shut up and do as you’re told.”
First, she wrote down her name and those of her family members, and then she listed her education, occupation, friends, possessions, property, monthly income, her interests and hobbies. For occupation, she hesitated for a moment between student and waitress, then ended up writing “café employee.” The detective took the paper and read it carefully.
“Why don’t you own any real estate?” he asked.
“Because I don’t have a house.”
“You must have put down a jeonse payment somewhere.”
“I don’t have that much money. I have to rent by the month.”
“You say that you don’t have a father and your mother runs a business. What is it?”
“She sells fish. She doesn’t have a store. She gets her fish at the fish auction at dawn and rents a spot on the ground in front of someone else’s store at the market.”
“So your mother suffered like that to sacrifice herself to pay for your college. And instead of studying what you’re supposed to, you went off to this stuff?”
Shinhye had nothing to say. At the mention of her mother, she felt unable to respond to any accusation.
“You’re wanted by the police, and so you’re lying low, aren’t you? It’s no use trying to hide anything. I’ll be checking everything with the computer in Seoul.”
“No, I’m not wanted. Like I wrote before, I was disciplined by the university, but there’s nothing else. I’m clean.”
“And why were you disciplined at school?
“…They said I organized an illegal assembly.”
“So you incited a student demonstration. When was that, exactly?”
“It was fall, two years ago? It would have been October of 1984. But it wasn’t a demonstration. It was just us getting together for a meeting to discuss problems at the school.”
That fall, the whole campus was abuzz with activity preparing for the annual Fall Festival. Banners and posters hung between the golden ginkgo trees. And at the entrance to the subway, the students, even while having their bags searched by the police, went diligently to their classes or busied themselves looking for a partner for the festival like well-trained elementary school kids. Everything looked normal on the surface.
The semester exam was after the festival, and when the exams and her papers were done, it was time for Shinhye to graduate. She was turning twenty-two in a few months and would become an elementary school teacher.
Of course, her mother looked forward to Shinhye’s graduation more than anyone. She behaved as if Shinhye were already halfway a teacher, believing that she was no longer handling fish slices at a market but the mother of a respectable educator. It wasn’t an unreasonable attitude. Her whole life she had endured all manner of suffering, sacrificing everything with her hopes riding on her daughter’s success, waiting, and now, finally, she could see those hopes becoming reality.
But Shinhye didn’t want to accept all of this for some reason. She was caught up in a sense of impatience, feeling that she was being pushed toward something she hadn’t wanted. Deep down, perhaps she wanted the same things her mother wanted, but her own desire had to be even stronger, and as the reality approached, she had become uneasy. It was probably this overwhelming anxiety that had prompted her to run away.
Sooim was the first to speak out. “Isn’t it kind of pointless to end our college careers like this?” she said. “It seems like we don’t even know how to get angry anymore. What will it be like when we’re teachers? After finishing school like this, what’s going to happen when we go out to our teaching assignments? Are you just going to be a loyal slave of the educational system?”
It was at the reading circle meeting where the friends who had studied together had gathered.
“You’re right! We can’t just stay like this,” Shinhye said. “Someone has to stand up and rekindle the cold hearts of students! If no one else will do it, then it’s up to us.”
“When did you become such a radical, Shinhye?”
Sooim’s remark made everyone laugh. In fact, among the friends, Shinhye had always been the skeptical and passive one until then. Someone quietly raised a question.
“But what could we possibly do?”
“We could at least organize a rally calling for democratization on campus.”
“But what’s the use of having a rally? What would that even accomplish these days?”
“It’s important now, even if we just end up throwing rocks,” Sooim said. “We can talk to students all we want about how to resist this fascist regime or defend the rights of people, but they won’t get it. We have to start with something they can actually touch that shows them they have the power to act. What are students most unhappy with right now? Isn’t it the dean? The undemocratic way he runs the university? All the female students are sick of being treated like they’re still high school girls. So the most effective thing would be to gather those complaints and push for democratization in the school.”
No one could disagree. Holding an assembly to demand democratization seemed an unimaginable challenge in the current political climate.
But when they thought about having to do, themselves, what no one had been able to do until then, Shinhye found herself shaking with excitement as if she were plotting a revolution. Even a long time afterwards, she still did not understand the nature of that excitement, that self-destructive impulse that welled up in her chest at that moment.
They began to discuss how to set up an assembly right away. The first hurdle was getting permission from the school authorities because, without it, their assembly would be broken up before they could even get started. Shinhye volunteered to take care of it. Professor Song, the dean of students, was also a well-known poet, and he liked Shinhye and had paid her special attention ever since she’d published some poems in the student newspapers.
She went to ask him for permission to hold a meeting. She said it was to survey the students about the Fall Festival.
“Do you really need to have an assembly for that?”
Ever the fashionable poet, black beret on his head and pipe in his mouth, he looked at her with suspicion.
“It’s because the students all have different opinions. We’ll only need an hour.”
Shinhye smiled, playing a student passionate about literature—a lover of poetry and an admirer of poets—but inwardly, she felt guilty.
“All right, but only an hour. And you know you’re absolutely not to discuss any other topic, right?”
The assembly was initially a great success. More than three hundred students gathered in the student union cafeteria and a heated discussion ensued.
And then it was as if a dam had broken. All the frustrations and dissatisfactions that had been bottled up until then came pouring out: undemocratic management of the school, the self-serving arbitrariness of the dean, the problem of teaching assignments after graduation, and numerous other issues. A pale Professor Song had come rushing to Shinhye, who was moderating the meeting.
“How could you trick me like this? I trusted you.”
Soon, his face red in front of the booing and hissing students, it seemed he had no choice but to step down. He had been anxiously fretting in the back of the room behind the students, but as the meeting approached its third hour and they were finally beginning to demand the dean’s resignation, he had ended up coming up to the podium looking like he was about to cry.
“Shinhye, please consider my situation. Do you really need to watch me resign?”
His hands were shaking as he adjusted his glasses. It was the first time Shinhye had seen another human being so consumed by fear. Seeing this fifty-year-old professor-poet in such stark terror shook her resolve. She put together a few demands and quickly brought the discussion to an end. But then, after the assembly, she had to listen to Sooim’s sharp reprimand.
“You’re so frustrating! We had a great opportunity, and you ruined it to save that professor’s reputation! In a fight, there’s no pity for the enemy!”
“But Professor Song isn’t our enemy!”
“You can’t even tell who the enemy is, can you? They’re all the same—puppets pulled by the strings of the fascist regime. We’ll never change anything if we sympathize with them or try to understand them.”
The assembly was over, but there was never a response to the demands, only the indefinite suspension of the five student organizers. One of them was reinstated after writing a letter of apology. As for the ones who refused to apologize—they had no choice but to take their punishment. Shinhye and Sooim were among those four.
“If you organized a demonstration, why didn’t the university just cut you loose?” Detective Kim said, blowing his cigarette smoke into Shinhye’s face. “What’s this indefinite suspension business?”
“The indefinite suspension was an unfair punishment. We didn’t shout any political slogans. We were only discussing campus issues with the dean’s permission.”
“You were suspended two years ago. What have you been doing since then?”
“Nothing…I was home by myself, studying.”
“So you’ve just been staying at home this whole time?”
He narrowed his eyes and gave her a sharp look. She hesitated with her answer. If she said one wrong thing she could get strung up by her ankles. But, then again, she couldn’t afford to hide something and have it found out.
“No. Actually, I left home and worked for about a year.”
“Doing what? And where? Did you get a job at a factory under an assumed name?”
“Not a job…I went to night school. A few months. Six months, actually.”
“Where?”
“I was in the Guro District at first, but they watched us too closely, so I moved to Seongnam.”
Detective Kim suddenly stood up. The door opened and two men entered the room. One of them—the one in his fifties—Shinhye had seen that morning in the other room. The other man wore a beige uniform. He was thin and had his graying hair neatly combed back. Detective Kim quickly saluted him.
“You said your name is Jeong Shinhye?” the man in the beige uniform asked.
The way he blinked his small eyes behind his glasses made Shinhye uneasy, and she answered in a timid voice.
He didn’t say anything else to her. Instead, he asked the man in the suit who was standing next to him, “Did you feed her? If you’re gonna interrogate her, at least give her something to eat.” Then he left the room. The man in the suit followed him out but then immediately returned.
“Did you get anything?” he asked Detective Kim.
“It’s not going to be easy to get this girl to talk. She’s not the type who’ll listen if we just use words.”
“That’s because you’re too nice! Anyway, we have to feed her, so bring her out.”
Shinhye staggered momentarily as she stood up. She had been sitting for several hours, and her knees felt like they’d turned to stone. It seemed her morning interrogation had ended more easily than she’d imagined. She let out an involuntary sigh of relief. But there was no assurance that it would continue that way. Nor did she even know, at the moment, how much longer it would go—or even if she would be released safely.
When she entered the other room, Detective Kim already had the phone in his hand.
“Hey, what do you want to eat?” he asked.
She hadn’t eaten anything since her arrest, but she didn’t feel hungry at all.
“I don’t have much of an appetite.”
“Don’t give me that crap. Will it be gomtang or doenjang jjigae?”
She ordered the gomtang, beef soup, and was just standing there, vacantly, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. It was Inspector Nam, the one who had brought her there.
“Drink this. You’ll feel better.”
He handed her a disposable cup full of coffee.
“Inspector Nam, always such a gentleman!” Kim exclaimed, looking toward them.
She sipped the coffee while sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. Her hands were shaking so much they could hardly bear the weight of the paper cup. She knew Nam had been watching her this whole time. When she turned her head to look at him, he bared his teeth in a silent laugh. She was so startled that, in her trembling hands, the coffee she was bringing to her lips spilled onto her clothes.