“You eat them — you eat them,” she had exulted.
“My stomach is stronger than my will, and that pleases you but it does not please me,” he had retorted.
He had blamed her in his heart because this was, he thought, another of her wiles to imprison him in a house and home. Only later did he recall that she had said her father was shot, and he was about to inquire of her how it had come about, and did not for fear she might bind him to her through sympathy and her need of comfort. Her father had been some sort of official in the Regent’s court, that he knew, for she had a seal that had belonged to him, a piece of jade carved in Chinese letters giving his name and rank, and she kept this jade with her, tied in a square of silk. She had two brothers, he also knew, for sometimes she spoke of their games together in a large garden somewhere and how she was stronger than they, and this made them angry.
“I am too tall,” she sighed.
When he had not replied to this, she looked at him sidewise, her beautiful eyes longing.
“Do you not think I am too tall?” she had coaxed.
He denied his own impulse to lie. “I have never thought of it,” he said.
Now with time and distance between them, he wished that he had told her the truth, that she was not too tall, since he was the taller. And one day, consumed with longing for her, he asked his old friend Choi if marriage was not a hindrance to him, and hoped to hear him say it was.
“Not only in matter of time that a woman demands,” Yul-chun added, “but in matter of the occupation of a man’s thoughts, the division in him between devotion to his country and to her.”
Choi laughed. “You spend more time thinking about women than I do, I swear! No, my brother, when you have a woman of your own, you no longer think of women. You do not think even of her. She is simply yourself, in you and with you. She makes you free. Moreover, she shares your work, if she is the right woman. Then, too, it is pleasant to have your clothes clean and your food cooked, and she takes care of your money so that it is not spent foolishly. You are always better off when you have a good wife.”
Yul-chun put such replies in his heart and slowly his heart changed his mind and he ceased to resist the thought of Hanya. Some day, he even thought, half dreaming, he might go north again and find her and his child. Not yet — not yet, whatever his longing, for he must stay by the revolution until in triumph he and his comrades entered the imperial city of Peking. Then he would return to his own country, for with their help, whom he had helped, his people too could be freed.
He saw Yak-san grow from a child to a youth, hard and brave and ruthless. The young were always ruthless, and Yul-chun saw himself again in Yak-san. At fifteen Yak-san had a new hero, the terrorist Wu Geng-nin, who led the attempt to kill the Japanese General Tanaka when he came to Shanghai to continue his plans for empire after he had written the memorial of demands upon China. The terrorists had arranged for attack from three directions as Tanaka came down from the ship which brought him from Japan. Wu was to shoot him with a pistol. If he failed, Kim Yak-san was to attack with a bomb. If the bomb did not kill, a third terrorist, He Chun-am, was to hack him with a sword. An American woman passenger, however, came down the gangway before Tanaka and when Wu fired she became afraid and grasped Tanaka. He, seeing what was happening, pretended to fall dead, and Wu, believing he had killed the enemy, turned to escape. He leaped into a taxicab but the driver would not drive him, and Wu threw him into the street and tried to drive himself but not knowing how to drive, was arrested before he went far by British police, who gave him to the French, since he lived with the other exiles in the French concession, and they in turn gave him to the Japanese. He was locked in a tower with several Japanese, one of whom was an anarchist. A Japanese servant girl pitied Wu and brought him a steel knife and he cut the lock from the door and with the anarchist he escaped to the house of an American friend who hid him until he could get to Canton to tell his story.
The young Yak-san sat at his feet, not only for the sake of Wu himself but because his other hero, Kim Yak-san, had been part of the plot. Wu was kind to the youth, and unknown to Yul-chun, he argued for terrorism to Yak-san, so that Yak-san’s heart was divided between the two men who befriended him.
In the next year the founder of the Chinese revolution, Sun Yat-sen, died in Peking and all revolutionists were cast into deep sorrow and gloom. Yet what could they do but persist in what had been planned? With Russian advisers an army was built under the headship of a young soldier, Chiang Kai-shek, who came back from military training in Japan and Russia.
A second revolution was soon in readiness, its armies trained to march north to the Yangtse River and proceed down that river to Nanking where a new capital was to be set in the heart of the ancient city. Yul-chun, now detailed to make translations of Marxist books from the Japanese, began to doubt more and more whether the Chinese revolutionists understood fully the hardships that lay ahead if they were to fulfill this dream of conquering their vast continental country. Their people were still firm in old ways, they were not yet discontented enough for revolt, and family tradition took the place of government. They were poor but they did not know it. Their landlords oppressed them but not to despair, or if to despair, they rose up and murdered the landlord with knives and pitchforks. Yul-chun perceived that his own countrymen understood reforms far better than the Chinese revolutionists did, because of the long oppressions of the Japanese in their own country, forcing Koreans to rebel, and because many young Koreans had been educated in Japan, where they had learned of anarchy and Karl Marx.
In an early spring the Second Revolution set forth on the journey northward, Kim, the ex-monk, still irrepressibly full of optimism and faith in mankind, among them.
“We will help our Chinese brothers, and then they will help us,” he told Yul-chun as they packed their knapsacks.
Yul-chun could only smile. His faith in the Chinese was dim, and he was no longer an optimist even about revolutions. On the last night before they were to leave the city he did not take part in the meeting of celebration. Instead he went to see three foreigners. One was an English labor leader, Thomas Mann by name though he was not related to the German writer. He was an old man, cheerful and in the loneliness of age affectionate with all the revolutionists whatever their group. Now when he saw Yul-chun at his door he took him by the arm and drew him into the small room which was his home.
“Come and have a cup of tea,” he coaxed. “Good English tea with a bit of sugar and milk. And I’ve some Huntley biscuits from England.”
Yul-chun sat down on a chair beside the small iron grate of coals. He drank the English tea which reminded him of Tibetan buttered tea he had drunk in Manchuria, and he listened for an hour to the old man’s rambling, casual talk of how the English people had achieved independence under their own kings. “Killing a king only when absolutely necessary, you know,” he said, chuckling. “In an odd sort of English way we rather like them, you know! It was our own government, after all, and we shaped it into a democracy. It wasn’t easy — Have another biscuit!”
Yul-chun, his school English taught by Americans, was puzzled by the strong English accent, but he could follow, and so he was moved to trust the benign old man, at least to trust his good heart, if not his mind, invincibly hopeful in his old age.
He was not so sure of the American, Earl Browder, whom he next sought. He had heard him make speeches against American imperialism and while they were clear and easy enough to comprehend, and were much applauded, yet Yul-chun felt an instinctive distrust of a man who accused his own government while he was in a foreign land and among foreigners from many countries. He watched Browder as they sat together in a hotel room. The man had the look of a scholar, but scholar or not, Yul-chun resolved never to trust an American again. As for Borodin, whom he visited last, this man was a short, stocky Russian, middle-aged, slow in speech, practical. He looked like a successful businessman rather than an ardent revolutionist, a man with a mind for organization, a father to the young enthusiastic childlike men whom he led. The youthful Chinese trusted this Russian, but for Yul-chun trust in any Russian was impossible. Too long Russians had been on Korean soil, too many plans they had laid for possession. Yes, the Czar was dead, but did a country change its soul because it changed a ruler?