My children were doing well. Min-lee and Sung-soo would soon have birthdays. They’d turn three and two. Jun-bu and I had been blessed with a second son, Kyung-soo. He was a docile baby, and it pleased me that Min-lee was already learning to take care of her brothers. My husband was respected by his students, and I was well established as a small-diver in the Bukchon collective. Despite our good fortune, we had our disagreements. Jun-bu remained clear that he wanted all our children to be educated, and at least once a week we had nearly the same conversation.
“Let me remind you of the old saying,” he said one afternoon after he’d had to punish a boy in his class for cheating. “If you plant red beans, then you will harvest red beans.” My mother had often recited this aphorism, and it explained that it was up to the parents to plant, grow, and nourish their children, so they became good and useful adults. Then he added, “You should want Min-lee to have the same opportunities as our sons.”
“I understand your wishes,” I responded. “But I continue to hope that if I have another baby, it will be a girl, who will help her older sister pay for her brothers’ learning. After all, it took three women—your mother, your sister, and me—to put you through school. When Sung-soo is ready to go to college, Min-lee will be nineteen and earning money by doing leaving-home water-work. But by the time Kyung-soo goes to college, Min-lee will surely be married. I’ll need at least one other haenyeo in the household to help pay for the boys’ school fees.”
Jun-bu just smiled and shook his head.
To me, all this showed that, as much as I loved and respected him, he was still only a man and didn’t have the larger worries I had. When he was at home or at school, I was in the world. I had to be practical and think ahead, because everything was unstable around us. Here we were a year after the demonstration and acts of retaliation continued. If village elders filed complaints that members of the Northwest Young Men’s Association had demanded money or bags of millet as bribes, they would not be seen again. If a group of leftists came down Mount Halla and shot a policeman, squads of policemen combed the mountain in search of the perpetrators. If the culprits couldn’t be found, the police shot innocent villagers as a lesson.
The U.S. military government decided to make some changes. Our first Korean governor was replaced by Governor Yoo, who was reported to wear sunglasses twenty-four hours a day and sleep with a gun. Even the U.S. authorities labeled him an extreme rightist. He purged all Jeju-born officials and replaced them with men who’d escaped from the north and were as anti-communist as he was. He swapped many Jeju-born police and police captains with men from the mainland, who’d never liked or had sympathy for the people of our island. He banned all People’s Committees and called those like my family and me, who’d benefited from them, extreme leftists. I was not an extreme leftist. I wasn’t even a leftist. No matter. There would no longer be classes for women or any of the other activities that the village chapters had organized.
We had only one newspaper on the island, but by the time a copy reached Bukchon the news might have been old, or it could have been wrong in the first place. Jun-bu also listened to the news on his radio, but one night he said rather glumly, “I think the station is controlled by the rightists, who, in turn, are controlled by the Americans. We have the gossip and rumors that pass from village to village, but can we trust anything we hear?”
I didn’t have an answer.
The Americans announced that on May 10 those of us living south of the Thirty-eighth Parallel would finally have our own elections. My husband’s spirits momentarily lifted.
“The Americans and the United Nations have vowed we will be free to vote as we wish,” he told me. But then reality brought him back to earth. “The Americans support Rhee Syngman as their preferred candidate. His biggest backers are former Japanese collaborators. Anyone who is against him is automatically labeled a red. Anyone who wants to punish former collaborators is labeled a red. That means that just about everyone on Jeju—including us—will be labeled a red.”
I worried about Jun-bu’s increasingly dark frame of mind.
A radio broadcast from a station above the Thirty-eighth Parallel offered an invitation to leaders from the south to go to Pyongyang to discuss reunification and write a constitution that would solve all our problems. In response, the U.S. military government and Governor Yoo strengthened their anti-communist crackdown on Jeju. Former Governor Park, originally appointed by the U.S. military, was the first to be arrested. He was famous, and people were shocked. Then the body of a young man was pulled from a river. He was identified as a protester. A witness to one of the torture sessions reported that the student had been hung from the ceiling by his hair and his testicles pierced with awls. There could not have been a mother on the island who did not imagine the grief she would feel if this boy had been her son.
In the early hours of April 3, we were roused from sleep by the sounds of gunfire, yelling, and people clattering through the olles. Jun-bu and I protected our children with our bodies. I was terrified. The children whimpered. The commotion seemed to last forever, but maybe it only felt that way because the night was so dark. Finally, Bukchon fell silent. Had arrests been made? How many people were shot, and how many had died? The gloomy shadows revealed no answers. Then we began to hear shouts.
“Hurry!”
“Come quick!”
Jun-bu got up and slipped on his trousers.
“Don’t go out there,” I begged.
“Whatever happened is over. People may be hurt. I must go.”
After he left, I held the children even closer. From outside, I heard men speaking in urgent voices.
“Look at the hills! They’ve lit the old beacon towers!”
“They’re sending a message around the island!”
“But what’s the message?” my husband asked.
The men muttered back and forth about it for a while longer but arrived at no conclusions. Jun-bu returned and lay down next to me. The children fell back asleep, curled around us like piglets. When dawn streaked the sky with pink hues, I quietly got up, changed into day clothes, and went outside. I was about to go to the village well when Jun-bu joined me.
“I’m coming with you. I don’t want you going alone.”
“The children—”
“They’re still asleep,” he said, picking up a water jar. “It’ll be safer to leave them here for a few minutes than to take them with us.”
We went to the front gate and peeked out. The olle was empty except for a few abandoned bamboo spears. We hurried to the main square, where we discovered that rebels had broken into the village’s one-room police station. Furniture littered the cobblestones. Papers drifted across the ground, pushed by the wind. A few uniformed men scrambled to pick them up. One man had a bandage on his head. Another limped. Some villagers had gathered under the tree to peer at a poster tacked to it. Jun-bu and I pushed our way to the front.
“Tell us what it says, Teacher,” someone said.
“Dear citizens, parents, brothers, and sisters,” he read, his eyes moving over the written characters. “Yesterday one of our student-brothers was found killed. Today we come down from the mountains with arms in hand to raid police outposts all over the island.”
The crowd murmured, confused, scared. Some voices of support rose for the rebels. Retribution had been exacted for the boy who’d been tortured and killed.