But even I could have recited the speeches. Korea should be independent. We should reject foreign influence. North and south should be reunited, so that we’d be one nation. The last speaker called for us to march, but getting twenty thousand people to walk in the same direction at once takes time. We finally began to move, with the mounted policemen herding us. We lost sight of Sang-mun and Jun-bu. I picked up my daughter, and Mi-ja carried her son. Just ahead of us a little boy—although later I heard it might have been a girl—about six years old jumped and laughed, excited by all that was happening around us. When his mother reached for him, he twirled away, straight into the path of one of the mounted police. The rider yanked the reins. The horse reared. The mother screamed, “Look out!” The boy fell. The horse’s hooves crashed down.
The policeman, up so high, pulled sharply on the reins, trying to turn the animal. As a crowd, we realized he wasn’t going to dismount to offer help, even though what had happened was clearly an accident. A chorus of voices called, “Get him! Get him! Get him!” People threw stones, which further startled the horse. The rider kicked the animal’s withers. It danced from side to side, trying to make its way through the crowd.
“He’s heading to the police station!” someone shouted.
“Don’t let him get away!”
The chants turned to “Black dog! Black dog!”
We came around a corner and into a large square. Police stood on the broad steps leading to the entrance of the station, with their bayonets thrust threateningly before them. They didn’t know what had happened. All they saw was an angry mob rushing toward them. The demonstrators near the front tried to stop, turn around, and flee, but we were in a raging sea, being pushed this way and that. We heard several popping sounds. This was followed by an eerie moment of silence, with everyone frozen in place, assessing. Then the screams began. People scattered in every direction. Amid the chaos, Mi-ja pulled the kids and me into a doorway. As the crowd thinned, we saw little islands of people dotting the square. At the center of each group, lying on the ground, a person. Some wailed in agony from their wounds. Death silence hung over others. An infant’s cries hiccuped through the square. Mi-ja and I looked at each other. We had to help.
With our children still in our arms, we trotted in the direction of the sound. We reached a woman, who lay facedown. A bullet had entered her back. Her body lay partially atop her baby. We set down Yo-chan and Min-lee next to each other, so Mi-ja could lift the dead woman’s shoulder and I could pull out the infant. Her mouth was a pink hole from which the most pitiable cries squawked out. Her eyes were squeezed so tightly shut that I could see where she’d have wrinkles one day. She was covered in blood.
Mi-ja and I rose together. I put the baby on my shoulder and patted her, while Mi-ja checked to see if she was injured. We were both concentrating so hard that when Sang-mun grabbed Mi-ja’s arm and jerked her away from me, we were completely startled.
He screamed in Mi-ja’s face. “How could you put my son in danger?”
“He wasn’t in danger,” she replied calmly. “I was holding him when the horse bolted—”
“What about the bullets?” His hands were clenched into fists. His face was as red as if he’d drunk a bottle of rice wine. “Did you not see danger in that?”
Jun-bu ran into the square. He visibly relaxed when he saw that the children and I were safe. He jogged over just as Mi-ja admitted, “I didn’t expect that the police would fire on us.” After a slight pause, she asked, “Did you?”
Sang-mun slapped Mi-ja. She staggered back and fell over Yo-chan and Min-lee. I rushed to her side. Jun-bu pulled Sang-mun away. My husband would lose in a fistfight, if it came to that, but he was taller and he carried the authority of a teacher.
Mi-ja had landed on her bottom. Red welts in the shape of Sang-mun’s hand had already begun to rise on her cheek. Yo-chan seemed scared but not particularly shocked or surprised. That’s when I realized that this couldn’t have been the first time he’d seen his father hit his mother. I felt terrible, sick with worry and horror. My grandmother had made this match—the daughter of a collaborator to the son of a collaborator—but Mi-ja and her husband could not have been more mismatched in their temperaments.
Sang-mun stuffed his hands in his pockets, whether hiding the weapons he’d used against my friend or keeping them ready for the next time, I couldn’t tell. When he looked away, I leaned in and, not for the first time, whispered to Mi-ja, “You could come live with us. Divorce is not uncommon for a haenyeo.”
She shook her head. “Where would I go? What would I do? We have a nice house on the base. My son is well fed, and he’s picking up English from the soldiers.”
She didn’t have to lay out the rest. My husband and I lived in a small house with our children and Yu-ri, and it was clear that we didn’t have enough to eat. If it had been me, though, I would have taken my children as far away as possible. I could work and support us, just as Mi-ja could provide for her son, if she wanted to.
Six people died in front of the police station—all but one of them shot in the back as they’d tried to flee. Another six were taken to the provincial hospital. Police posted there were so agitated—having heard the gunshots from the march—that they fired indiscriminately into the air and killed two passersby. A curfew was declared.
The next morning, my husband read to me the contradictory reports in the newspaper. “Some onlookers claim the boy was killed instantly by the horse. Others say he died later from his wounds.”
“That’s awful.”
“But listen to this,” Jun-bu went on, incensed. “The U.S. Twenty-fourth Corps has taken an entirely different view. They’re reporting that a child was slightly injured when he inadvertently ran into a policeman’s horse.”
I shook my head, but Jun-bu wasn’t done.
“Then the police department sent someone out to say the shootings in the square were justified as a matter of self-defense, because people armed with clubs had attacked the station.”
“But there was no attack, and no one carried anything other than a child or a placard mounted on a bamboo pole!”
“You don’t have to tell me.” Jun-bu shrugged in disgust. “They’re labeling the shooting ‘unfortunate’ and ‘inconsiderate.’ ”
It was all very upsetting, but Jun-bu went to the school and I went to the bulteok.
At the end of the day, when we were rowing back to shore, haenyeo on another boat hailed us. We rowed closer to trade gossip.
“Police have taken into custody the organizers of the demonstration, as well as twenty-five high school students,” their chief told us. “We’ve heard they’re beating the kids.”
We couldn’t believe it.
That night, in violation of the curfew, people pasted posters on walls across Jeju. The South Korean Labor Party was asking all islanders to protest the U.S. military government and fight against American imperialism. They asked for money to help the victims who’d survived and for the families of those who hadn’t. They demanded that the police who’d fired the shots be brought to trial and sentenced to death. They requested the immediate removal of any Japanese sympathizers or collaborators from the ranks of the police. Last, they implored all Jeju people to join a general strike on March 10.
The leader of this movement was twenty-two years old and a teacher. Jun-bu told me he did not know him.
Farmers, fishermen, factory workers, and haenyeo joined the strike, as did policemen, teachers, and post office workers. Businessmen came out of harbor offices, banks, and transportation companies. Shopkeepers shut their doors. The strike was an immediate and overwhelming success, but people very high up labeled it red-influenced. This caused the American military government to side with the hard-liners and the government on the mainland to send members from the Northwest Young Men’s Association to help maintain order.