the school teacher
praised my kid saying
his grades were so-so
but he was good at stopping kids fighting.
Then, pinching the wrinkles between his eyebrows,
Mr Kim said:
‘In future,
the time will come when everyone lives equally well.
The land will not belong to landowners
but to all who farm it.’
I lost all taste for liquor and opened my eyes wide.
Inside the tavern
there was an old woman
and two other drinkers.
A few days later I heard
that a plainclothesman was coming to arrest me.
The village head shook his head:
Strange,
strange.
You’re no commie.
I was scared.
I escaped to my wife’s home several miles away,
then moved to another house.
I kept moving around,
as I hated being a burden to other people.
Then a man told me he was on his way up into the mountains,
so I followed him.
I was no commie.
Then, eventually,
I became a commie.
From Jiri Mountain I used to look toward home,
longing to go back down.
Longing to go back down.
Commie 3
When I was six,
my maternal uncle
set me behind him on his bicycle
and sped along the new road with poplars on both sides.
That uncle
was my ideal.
Uncle was a university student in Japan.
Uncle passed the higher civil-service exam.
Everyone in the village came to the congratulatory party
at my mother’s parents’ house.
But my uncle rejected official positions,
went roaming
all the way to Seoul,
to Buan,
to Daegu.
He was arrested at Suwon Station in 1943.
He spent six years in Daegu jail.
Uncle was a socialist.
Uncle was a revolutionary.
I thought about my uncle in prison.
I stopped playing with Bong-Jin, the local landowner’s son.
I decided to stop thinking about pretty Suk-Nye,
daughter of the village head.
Instead,
I played with Su-Man and Tae-Rang who were from poor families.
I shared my ration of food with them.
I gave them my pencils.
From the age of 15
I was a socialist like my uncle.
Only nobody
knew that I was a socialist.
At night, alone,
I used to tremble.
Uncle Yu Sang-Seop finally died in his fourth prison.
It was the day after Stalin died.
I burned one of Uncle’s books up the hill behind the house.
I cried a lot.
It was where foxes used to cry
but now there were no more foxes.
Lovely Geum-gak
He was such a lovely boy.
It was no surprise that even men,
sighing in admiration,
felt secret passions for him.
Truly,
he was a boy like a spider’s web with fresh dewdrops
like a flower’s stamen with pure dewdrops,
a boy with the spirit of the point of an arrow flying
He was a young old man
such that no one should dare make light of him.
Living in exile high in Mount Paek-un,
Heobong had a little boy, Geum-gak,
as company for his solitude,
By the age of ten he was said to have read most books.
Heobong praised him:
‘You are truly my teacher,
how could I ever be your teacher?’
At eighteen, that boy was dying of lung disease.
‘If heaven grants me a few more years of life,
I would like to read the books I have not yet read
before I leave the world.
What’s the use of praying?
Father, mother, do not cry for me,’
and with those words, he closed his eyes.
Should a life be supposed to be long?
Should a life be supposed to be whole
only when it leaves something behind?
Swallows go south leaving nothing.
Headmaster Shin Jin-seop
The headmaster wore round, black-rimmed glasses.
The moustache below his nose
was always neatly trimmed.
He left a dry cough as a sign of his presence
in places where nobody was to be seen.
He had extra time to care for the flowers,
in the school garden
and in the garden in his official residence.
Coxcombs,
four-o’clocks,
asters,
plantain lilies,
chrysanthemums…
the flowers bloomed in harmony according to the season.
One evening
guerrillas came down from the hills.
When they demanded the mimeograph machine,
he said he could not give it to them
because it belonged to the school.
They said that they couldn’t help but kill him.
He opened the office.
They carried off the machine.
The next day the police took away the headmaster, his hands tied;
he was guilty of helping guerrillas.
He became a traitor,
a red.
His limbs drooped.
He was beaten with clubs
until nearly a corpse.
He ceased being a headmaster,
became a convict and began a ten-year imprisonment.
What he most envied were those convicts who took care of flowers.
Every day,
they took care of flowers –
dahlias and roses.
The cut flowers were sent outside to be sold.
How he longed to take care of flowers,
just like when he was headmaster.
Yi Bok-nam from Geochang
In January 1951, Yi Cheol-su was fourteen.
His grandmother, Yu Bun-nyeo,
his father, Yi Jong-muk,
his mother, Ms Baek,
his younger brother, Cheol-ho,
the farmhand, Mr Bak,
the maid, Cham-rye with the double-crowned hair,
all six were massacred for the crime of being reds.
However,
Cheol-Su and his younger sister Bok-nam survived,
having gone to their mother’s home.
The southern soldiers
dragged ten-year-old Bok-nam off
and drove a nail through her palm
to force her to say she was a red.
‘I’m not a red,
I’m not a red,’
she screamed.
Finally,
she said,
‘I’m a red,’
and fainted.
The world was frozen.
The sky
was frozen
blue,
deep blue.
Her brother, Cheol-su,
afraid of the world,
afraid of the soldiers,
stole away into the mountains.
Inevitably,
he became a young partisan guerrilla.
In 1956,
nurse Yi Bok-nam of the Red Cross Hospital in Daejeon,
a scar in her right palm where the nail went through, was quiet.
Right-handed as a child,
she was quiet now and left-handed.
She was so good at giving subcutaneous injections
that the patients never knew if the needle was in or not.
When she delivered an injection into a vein
nobody felt the least pain.
Im Chae-hwa