often therefore changed into the wife’s family name.
My case has nothing to do with such customs.
However, my family name can be Kim,
or Nam
or sometimes Jang.
Yet I am no swindler.
Not content with those names, anyway,
I adopt my mother’s surname Ko
and am sometimes called Ko.
Once I got dreadfully drunk
and fell into an old-style latrine,
after which I was Bun,
meaning Shit.
Until the 1970s, some eccentrics from the late Joseon period
continued to live with various names like this,
which meant that life was never boring.
My family name was Shit.
The Long-Term Guest at the Dabok Inn in Dadong
Jin Dal-ho
was a man with plans, great or shaky,
who sold his lands in Jeong-eup in North Jeolla
and came up to Seoul.
Though born to the fields,
his body as a whole
was in good shape,
no need for a carpenter to ply his inked cord.
His lips were always fresh,
and when he washed up in the morning
he never gave a damn about others in the queue.
He washed his neck,
behind his ears, beneath his ears,
the ridge of his nose,
even his chest beneath his undervest, two or three times.
He soaped for a long time,
and rinsed off the foam for a long time, too.
Only then did he say: Now I feel alive, I can enjoy my food.
Yet day after day nothing worked out
and he stayed at the Dabok Inn as a long-term guest
for over a year.
His notebook held
the President’s phone number,
some National Assemblyman’s phone number,
even the switchboard at Midopa department store,
each compactly set down,
but day after day nothing worked out.
All he could manage was
to seduce the woman working at the inn
and make love to her at night.
Three Feet of Rotten Rope
In Yeongdong, North Chungcheong province,
nobody cared about the Yushin Reforms or anything else.
There was one man who took care of all the village’s unpleasant jobs
such as renting a room for gamblers,
laying out the body if someone died,
castrating a pig,
mating cows or horses.
That was No Bong-gu.
So poor that the roof of his house rotted into furrows,
but always warm-hearted
like the fire in a brazier.
In the winter when it was too cold to move,
and children walked with short, quick steps,
red-nosed,
he would shelter them from the wind, saying:
‘Ah, you must be cold!’
But he was so poor that finally his children were starving.
Somehow he got hold of three yards of rotten straw rope,
tied it to a tree
and hanged himself.
Or rather, pretended to hang himself,
not intending to die.
Once they got wind of that,
the villagers gathered grain
so he and his children could survive
the winter.
‘No, it would never do for him to die.
Who would do the hard work
in our village,
in the neighbouring villages,
if not No Bong-gu?’
A Night in Mugyo-dong
The food was seasoned with deep-red pepper powder.
The red pepper that people began to eat
from the late Joseon period
is like something Koreans have eaten since ancient times.
You only have to take a bite,
ahh,
a fire kindles in the mouth.
The drinkers’ delight in 1960s and 70s Seoul
was to empty ten bottles of strong soju
alongside such hot –
and salty — side-dishes,
when it was already eleven at night, nearly curfew time.
Why did they have to be so tough?
Around that time everything used to get exaggerated.
Even Park Jung-hee got exaggerated,
so that he shrank to bean-size.
If someone shouted
that brat Park Jung-hee,
that brat was even using his daughter as First Lady,
and so on,
that gave him authority
and the friends who had come with him would pay for the drinks.
One day I picked up a scrap of newspaper
off the cement floor of that kind of bar
and first learned about the self-immolation of the young worker Jeon Tae-il.
The Time It Takes to Piss
There were plenty of prisoners in Daegu prison with long or life terms.
One of the long-term prisoners
with a stiff white beard
looked out into the corridor
and questioned a green youth who had just come from trial.
‘What did you get?’
‘One year two months.’
‘Hell, call that a sentence?
That’s the time it takes a lifer to piss.
Hey, how can that be called a sentence?’
Jang Gwang-seop, with his one year two months,
was nicknamed Muhammad Ali.
Even when he got a thrashing from a guard,
he would brush himself off, stand up as if nothing had happened,
and calmly walk away.
This Ali Jang Gwang-seop
was one of the descendants of Jeong Mong-ju,
who stayed loyal to Goryeo to the bitter end
and wrote a last poem before he was killed.
The poem began:
‘Though I die
and die again a hundred times…’
An Old Prison Officer
Starting as an errand boy in Gyeongseong jail
long ago during the Japanese colonial period,
he became assistant guard,
then guard,
the lowest rank of prison officer,
for forty-seven years in all.
His work was tying the ropes
and fastening the handcuffs
of those going out for morning sessions,
for interrogations by the prosecution or for trial in court.
His pock-marked face was dark
and his eyes looked as though he had not eaten for three days.
His gold-rimmed hat
sat a little too heavily on him.
When convoy vehicles numbers one and two left early in the morning,
he went along as escort.
In the evenings, as a substitute guard,
he would go peeking into this cell and that,
and if the prisoners kindly offered him
fallen apples or
rice cakes they had bought,
he would take them without hesitation,
with not a word of thanks, saying:
‘This rice cake is made with wheat flour,
and coated with soy bean powder.’
For meals he made do with prison food.
When he went home, he did nothing but catch up on his sleep
because he always had triple shift overtime.
That’s why he told the prisoners:
‘No lifer has anything on me, you know.’
The Person in Charge of Detention Cells at Seodaemun Police Station
In winter it was like the outdoors.