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‘I have neither natural talent nor good discipline,’

said the man,

‘so please listen with a generous heart.

First I will sing a danga

inviting you to sing.’

The man sang a danga:

‘Flowers are blooming on this hill and that…’

Once his sometimes sonorous,

sometimes delicate singing ended,

he bowed politely

and took back the drumstick.

Now the girl rose softly to her feet,

lifted her scarlet skirts slightly,

opened the fan,

began the first passage from the Song of Chunhyang.

Her dazzling voice,

flowing over and pouring out,

joined with the stream below.

The man rose, saying:

‘I have heard most precious singing.’

The girl stood there, replying:

‘Oh no, not at all.

I am humbled and grateful that you have listened.

May you have a safe journey home.’

An Elderly Comfort Woman

A passage in Kakou Senda’s

Military Comfort Woman says:

An old Korean woman of sixty

living in Japan

was never able to return to her own country.

In the colonial period

she was a sex slave for Japanese soldiers.

Some days she serviced 300 or 320.

Don’t be surprised.

If each man took a minimum of three minutes,

that means she lay there for seventeen hours with legs spread.

In spite of that, she did not die.

This happened in the South Pacific, in remote Rabaul.

It might have been better

had she been bitten by a cobra and died.

Because of the soldiers’ inflamed desire,

having never seen a woman for months and months,

the women never had a day off.

That comfort woman,

that old Korean Japanese woman

died beside a small brazier in an old tatami room.

Skin covered her bones,

clothes covered her skin,

so she was no longer a comfort woman.

I will not mention her name here.

A Child

One very cold day in January, 1978, thirteen or fourteen below zero,

there were some 130,000 shacks on the outskirts of Seoul,

housing one and a half million people

who leased with key money deposits,

or rented some of the smallest, just 5 pyeong in size

or 12.

All told, one-fifth of Seoul’s seven and a half million

lived in shacks

on the banks of streams,

on hillsides,

on scraps of suburban land.

Shacks covered with planks and roofing,

in Sadang-dong,

Bongcheon-dong,

Sillim-dong,

Siheung-dong,

Changsin-dong,

on the banks of Cheonggye Stream, Jungnang Stream.

One latrine for twenty households:

fierce fights at the latrines from early morning on.

An abandoned child

in a steep alley between the shacks

in Sadang 4-dong

was fourteen years old

but looked thirty.

What’s your name?

Ju Man-seok.

The naked child stood with his penis bluish in the cold,

his drooping penis looked forty.

And yet,

and yet,

a smile remained,

a flower-like smile,

or rather,

that of a child with chronic intestinal problems,

a dried-up smile.

A Day without Beggars

When John Foster Dulles came a-visiting

in the time when the Liberal Party ruled,

and after that

when Henry Kissinger came,

and in 1979 when Jimmy Carter came,

the Korean Ministry of Home Affairs

rounded up every last beggar

on the streets of Seoul

and locked them up in a camp in Nokbeon-dong.

No beggars here.

Beggars with only one leg,

beggars with only one arm,

beggars pretending to be deaf and dumb,

beggars so sick

there was no telling when they would die,

and beggars unable to get fifty won in a day,

or the opposite,

beggars who threateningly thrust out a wide open hand

glaring as fiercely

as did wounded veterans in the streets in the 50s,

all such beggars were swept away.

No beggars here.

Human nature comes in two varieties,

that of a thief or that of a beggar.

A day without beggars is a day for thieves.

Carter,

I hope you and your mysterious, beguiling smile

scamper back to Washington quickly.

VOLUME 16

Seung-ryeol’s Tomb

If the Soviet guards catch you, you’re done!

That evening

it was raining steadily.

A few families, escaping southward,

inched across the mountains, holding their breath.

At last they reached the 38th parallel.

If the Soviet guards catch them, they’re done for!

As they crossed the line

a baby started to cry.

Its mother muffled the sound

swaddling the baby in a blanket.

Finally they were safe.

The guide, once paid, vanished.

On the sodden ridge, scratched by the brushwood,

they all sighed with relief in the rain.

We’re alive, they gasped.

We’ve made it,

The blanket muffling the baby was unwound.

The one-year-old

was dead, suffocated.

The mother shook her dead baby.

She shook it

and wailed.

‘Seung-ryeol, Seung-ryeol, Seung-ryeol… Seung-ryeol.’

The father, having no spade, dug a hole in the earth with his bare hands.

He snatched the baby’s body from her arms and buried it.

Seung-ryeol,

Seung-ryeol,

Seung-ryeol…

Elena

She was born in early spring 1940

near a fresh green barley-field, skylarks soaring.

Her mother lacked milk so went round the village with her infant,

and she survived thanks to the milk other mothers gave grudgingly.

So her life began as a baby beggar.

From the age of six

she started doing night work, keeping her mother company.

So she set out on a wearisome life as a child labourer.

After the war

she was sixteen, quite beautiful.

When she smiled the slightest smile

dimples appeared on both her cheeks.

Desolate times though they were,

some bright angel seemed to have alit upon her eyes.

In the summer of 1956

on her way home from evening classes

she was raped

by two US soldiers in a jeep.

She wanted to die.

She wanted to die.

Even heaven no longer existed.

And her hometown was no refuge;

it was a place of pointing fingers.

Weeping

she left home and,

as fate would have it,

became a whore outside a US base in Songtan, Geonggi province.