after three months’ occupation by the North,
hope was everywhere.
By a low shack where the stream’s murmuring was always heard
outside of north Jaha Gate, Seoul,
surely the apricot trees would blossom next spring?
The daughter of that house, as she lay in bed sick,
was raped by a man in a UN jacket.
She collapsed,
the man spat, then vanished.
On roadside telegraph poles, flyers were posted:
Long live President Syngman Rhee! Long live General MacArthur!
Hope was everywhere.
Young Jun-ho
After scattering his father’s ashes
over the fast-flowing stream
from the dusky bank of the Seomjin River,
the boy looked up
toward Nogodan Ridge.
It was shrouded in cloud.
From now on fourteen-year-old Jun-ho,
wherever he is, will live without a father,
starving one day in three.
The wind will always be against him.
The boy takes after his father, chip off the block.
Commie’s kid,
Commie’s kid:
that name will stay with him all his life.
Bachelor Kim
Prisoner number 7501.
They called him ‘number seven thousand five hundred and one’.
They called him ‘seven five o one’.
Sometimes,
they called him
Bachelor Kim.
He came in aged 27 –
forty-five years of solitary confinement in a tiny cell
The day came when he was released, aged 72.
At dawn his cell door opened.
‘You’ve had a hard time,’
his first warm greeting.
A firm conviction that still sometimes blazed up
was lodged firmly inside his withering body,
utterly unchanged.
Bachelor Kim.
He entered as a youthful bachelor,
exited an elderly bachelor.
His clear, high-pitched voice
was rarely heard
under a forehead sunk like a weathered grave.
He was taciturn.
His real name was Kim Seon-myeong.
He was a soldier in the People’s Army, then a POW.
Despite the Geneva Convention
he was first sentenced to death,
then to life imprisonment.
As a child, all the land
for miles around was his family’s.
He was the son of a man whose land yielded ten thousand bushels,
10,000 bushels, annually.
Afterwards,
the war between South and North
immured one young man in prison for so many years.
He once said to someone that living is better than dying,
— sure, living.
Bachelor Kim’s remaining life was the life of a stone
sunk in water all on its own.
Man-su’s Grandma
They barely avoided the miseries of a refugee camp.
They built a shack at the top of Dodong hill opposite Seoul Station.
The family of five felt blessed.
However, Mansu’s grandma had lost her wits
amid the crowds of people fleeing
in the winter of 1950.
‘Let’s go,
let’s go,
let’s go home,’
she used to insist after pissing on the floor.
Her son Sun-gon was a porter at the railway station.
Her grandsons Man-su and Man-gil delivered newspapers at dawn.
They ate dark brown soup with dough flakes twice a day,
around a small circular table.
The old woman poured out curses
at her daughter-in-law in the kitchen:
‘You bitch, you brought me here,
bitch, you brought me here to kill me,’
and then she sobbed,
and continued to shout:
‘Let’s go,
let’s go,
Sun-kon,
let’s go home.
Let’s leave that bitch behind and go.’
The nights were all hers.
She had never been more than a mile or so from home.
Born at the foot of Cheonbul Mountain in South Hamgyeong province,
on marrying she moved to the nearest village
over the hill,
lived there for sixty-six years.
Then she was brought hundreds of miles down to unfamiliar Seoul.
‘Let’s go,
let’s go,’
that was all she said,
never removing the towel wrapped round her head.
The House with Wooden Tiles
Sacred, truly sacred, is the smoke rising as evening rice is being cooked!
Until August 10, 1945,
Korea was a single whole.
Since August 10, 1945,
Korea has been two.
America it was that proposed dividing the peninsula at the 38th parallel,
American forces occupying the South,
Soviet troops the North.
The Japanese surrender
on August 15, 1945
was supposed to signify the liberation of Korea.
In fact, it signified
the division of Korea.
The 38th parallel passed through an old wood-tiled house,
a house built by slash-and-burn farmers
on a hilltop above the Soyang River in Inje County, Gangwon province,
at the waist of the peninsula.
Northern guards occupied it.
Southern guards challenged them.
Both shouted: It’s our house,
it’s our land.
Each threatened the other,
firing blanks.
Then someone had a bright idea:
What about demolishing
the house altogether?
That’s it!
The house roofed with wooden tiles in that remote valley,
a house inhabited by four generations,
vanished.
The owner, Im Bong-sul, aged sixty-four,
and his granddaughter Im Gasina, aged fourteen,
left carrying bags and bedding.
The old man wept all the way, without shedding tears.
The little girl did not cry.
She stared down at the Soyang River below,
a river she would never see again.
Homecoming
At the end of June 1950
5th-year middle-school student Kim Myeong-gyu enlisted as a volunteer.
His regiment
kept retreating on the pretext of relocating.
While Dabuwon above Waegwan
was captured and recaptured dozens of times,
he survived.
How is it that he survived?
one of just nine survivors in his platoon?
His face was covered with pimples.
After Seoul was recaptured,
he came back home,
carrying his rifle.
His long-widowed mother
and his older brother Se-gyu
had been killed by the withdrawing communists.
The neighbours held a welcoming party for him.
He spent one day
at his mother’s grave
and his brother’s grave.
He even paid a visit to his father’s grave,
whom he had never seen.
Late that night, a shot rang out.
He had killed himself.
A couple of soju bottles lay beside him, toppled over.
Yang Hyeong-mo
Snow drove furiously down