He was walking side by side with Yak-san in the even swift stride that had become habit. The scene about them was one of peace. Autumn had come, harvests were gathered and the fields, quiescent in waiting for winter, made an ordered pattern, broken only by the low thatched roofs of villages where the landfolk lived and had lived for thousands of years. The immense land spread of China and Manchuria belonged to these folk. Even the landlords knew in their hearts that the land was not theirs in truth, whatever the purchase price. And landfolk could be cruel. Unless Communism made them gentle, they could be very cruel.
“The scene is peace,” Yul-chun said to Yak-san, “but there is no peace. I do not speak of the battles among war lords in China but I speak of the war of centuries. Do you remember the young man who was killed in Hailofeng, the one I tried to save?”
“I remember,” Yak-san said. “We were the same age.”
They said no more, for they had learned in the dangerous years not to speak if silence were more safe and they had become taciturn by habit. But Yul-chun remembered. The landfolk of the region had that day brought to the revolutionary court of judgment a young man of handsome and frank countenance. He wore the ragged garments of the poor, but the landfolk accused him of disguise.
“He is not one of us!” they had shouted. “Look at his skin — like a woman’s! He is as white as a foreigner. Surely he is one of our enemies.”
Yul-chun, who that day sat in the court, had taken pity on the young man. It was not too hard to see old men killed whose faces told the story of their evil lives and he had learned to watch such deaths, impassive and silent. But this man was young and intelligent and one who could perhaps be won to the revolution. The landfolk, however, were implacable.
“He is our enemy,” they insisted.
“Do you know his name?” Yul-Chun had inquired.
“His name does not matter,” they had replied. “He is our class enemy.”
And they clamored for his death.
When no hope was left, two women, one older, one younger, came from the waiting crowd, also dressed in poor garments. It was easy to see that they too were not landfolk. Each took the young man’s hand, right and left, and side by side the three walked to the wall of execution and there all were shot. Of the many whom he had seen thus killed, Yul-chun could not forget the faces of these three, kindly and intelligent and pure. Now the memory came freshly and he allowed himself to wonder whether the revolutionists had been wise in following the Communist pattern. Alas, it was too late for China to decide but for his own country there was still time. And he remembered what Kim had told him of the retreat to the northwest. Kim and the remaining Koreans had marched with the Chinese Communists until they heard that Yul-chun was in Peking, and they left the Chinese there and gathered in the temple. Days and nights they had talked, telling Yul-chun all that had happened.
The Chinese Red Army had fought bravely, they had suffered starvation and sickness, but the Nationalist troops had outnumbered them a hundred to one again and again. Only when the landfolk began to help the Red soldiers with food and clothing and new straw sandals were they able to escape from constant defeat. Their great mistake at first had been to meet the enemy in battle. Face to face they had always lost.
They had lost count of time in days of danger and suffering and hunger, in nights when they halted beside river or brook and washed their wounds and buried their dead. They had been forbidden to rob the landfolk of food as the enemy did, and yet they starved if they did not, or begged. They had eaten sweet potatoes roasted in coals or boiled in soup, they said, until never again would they willingly eat sweet potatoes. And what of the days when they marched through heat and long grass, their blood drained by huge mosquitoes, so that they were weakened for months thereafter by the chills and sweats of malaria, for which they had no remedy! They took off their white summer garments lest they be seen by the enemy and crawled on their hands and knees, and they dared not cough lest the sound betray them to the hovering enemy. They slept by day and walked by night and they learned to sleep as they walked. There were days upon days of which now they could remember nothing except that they waked in the house of some merciful peasant, hidden in a village whose name they did not know, and then they walked again. Sometimes they found fellow Koreans and again each was alone and lost among the Chinese. Many they never saw again and they thought them dead.
“I thought Kim was dead,” one said, “until once on a city street my hand was clutched and I knew I felt Kim’s hand although I could not recognize the face I saw!”
Here Kim broke in. “I saved myself by lying under the water of a rice paddy, only my nostrils above water, and thus I hid for several days.”
The long march was ended, the Chinese Communists were in the far northwest, the Nationalists were in Nanking. But none of this was important now, in Yul-chun’s mind. He had left it all behind. He was going home. Home! The word, so long unused, summoned Hanya again. It was time now to find her, to find their child, and take them with him, home.
Yet so committed was he that he could not prevent himself from lingering on the way to set up people’s schools here and there. His way was to find one man or boy who could read a little, or if he could not read, possessed a good intelligence, and teach him how to teach others, and so begin a school.
To the landfolk, he said, “This one is your teacher, but if he is to teach you, then you must find him shelter, and two suits of clothes, one for summer, one for winter.”
This they were willing to do, and so wherever Yul-chun went, he left behind him centers of hope and enlightenment, small indeed, but each a light in the surrounding dark of ignorance. His journey was lengthened by years beyond what he had planned, and often in the lonely nights he reproached himself for delay. Yet he could not harden his heart against these eager, good landfolk of China, whom none had heeded or helped for a hundred years. And so he lingered and so he stayed, chafing and longing all the while to be on his way.
It was more, too, than love of his own people and his own country. He was no longer a youth and in the lonely nights he thought of Hanya and their child. In each place Yul-chun made inquiry about her. Few remembered her. Even in Peking where they had lived together, he and she, he had been unable to find any trace of her. It was only when they came to a dust-ridden village in Manchuria where he and Hanya had once lived for a few months that he heard of her. Here he and Yak-san went to the home of a Korean who had known Kim when he was a monk, and after Yul-chun was washed and rested, he went into the streets and to the market, everywhere that he and Hanya once were known. The faces now were strange and people shook their heads, and after six days of such search, unwillingly he began to believe that perhaps she was dead.