The First Life
Lee Suhyun's grandfather, Lee Ki-jo, did not have an easy first life.
Born in 1930, he married in January of 1949 and set up house in Deokjeong-ri, Yangju County, Gyeonggi Province, just outside Seoul. The woman he married was Yang Soonrye. Ki-jo rented fields from the landlord of Deokjeong-ri and worked them as a tenant, and that first year the harvest came in abundant. The son born after the autumn gathering was like a blessing laid upon the two of them.
The young couple wrapped the baby in a swaddling quilt, stepped outside, and watched the steam locomotives coming and going through Deokjeong Station as they spoke of the years ahead.
"Grind through ten years of it, and we ought to be able to buy six majigi of land."
In that first life, Lee Ki-jo's whole ambition was six majigi—some twelve hundred pyeong, about an acre of paddy. With that much rice field, his family could harvest enough to eat for a year. To reach it, he meant to hire himself out even in the farm slack season and scrape together a little more. The master of Deokjeong Station, who thought well of him, had already promised him a laborer's place unloading freight from the trains.
Keep the family fed that way, and if I can send the boy even as far as middle school, he might become a township clerk someday. Then my life will have been a success.
It was a humble dream, but a sure one.
The happiness did not last.
On the morning of June 25, 1950, artillery boomed from the direction of Dongducheon, a town a little over ten ri north of Yangju—scarcely three miles. He hurried to Deokjeong Station. The station master looked busy.
"Sir, do you know what's happening?"
"Looks like there's some kind of ruckus up along the Thirty-Eighth Parallel."
"A ruckus?"
Lee Ki-jo did not really understand what a ruckus of that sort meant.
"Sorry to ask, but could you work the station just for today? Orders came down to move every last bit of freight to Cheongnyangni Station, and the time they've given us is far too short."
"Yes, sir. I'll do it."
Lee Ki-jo gave up a day in the paddies and chose to help the station master. Only with that goodwill, he reckoned, would he be taken on at the station when the fields went quiet. While he was loading the freight stacked at Deokjeong onto the cars, a train carrying ROK soldiers pulled in and spilled the men onto the platform. Every one of them wore a grave face and carried a rifle.
"Say, Ki-jo. You're twenty-one now, aren't you?"
The veteran dockhand working beside him asked it as they both watched the soldiers.
"Yes, hyung."
"Right up to the age for the army, then……."
He said it while telling a story out of the Japanese occupation.
"When I was your age, they nearly dragged me off to the Pacific War. The fellows from the neighborhood who went for forced labor all died. Not a single one came home."
The dockhand hiked up his trouser leg and showed him a crooked ankle.
"My father did this. I lived because of him. Turning into a bit of a cripple isn't so great a problem. A man can still make a living."
"Yes……."
"You said you've got a child, didn't you?"
"Yes. One son. He's a year old."
"Nine out of ten who get dragged into the army die. So……."
"Hey! Kim! What are you doing standing around with the hired man? You don't see that freight piled up?"
The crew chief's bellow came down on them. The two bent to the work again. Around noon the between-meal snack was brought out, and Ki-jo emptied a bowl of noodles in a few swallows before looking in at the station master's office.
The station master had been on the telephone with a grim face; when Ki-jo came in, he set the receiver down.
"What is it? You need to get home?"
"No, sir. I was only curious……."
"Ah. You mean the soldiers who came into the station?"
"Yes."
"Men of the 7th Division. Word is the ROK Army's mopping up partisans around Mount Soyo."
"Partisans?"
"You know…… the Reds. Communists, I mean."
"I see……."
In all his life Lee Ki-jo had never once laid eyes on a communist. He did not even know what communism was. He worked until late into the night, took his day's wage from the station master, and went home. Nineteen-year-old Soonrye washed the back of her twenty-year-old husband, who had come in steeped in sweat and dust, put on a soybean-paste stew, and laid out a late supper.
"Dear, they say there's trouble. Can we really just stay like this? What if we tried running as far as Uijeongbu?"
Lee Ki-jo, lifting the first spoonful, heard Yang Soonrye's worry and laughed.
"I heard the station master out. He says it's nothing much—it'll be settled in no time. He even told me to come help again tomorrow."
"If it's nothing much, why are they moving everything at the station down to Seoul……? Something feels wrong."
Yang Soonrye said it while giving her breast to the fretting child.
"It's all right. If word gets around that we cleared out of the village over a thing this small, we might not be given land to tenant next year. Who would trust us? Hold our ground, though, and I can leave a sure mark with the station master."
Lee Ki-jo was certain his judgment was sound. The couple went to sleep early that night, and still the guns kept sounding out of Dongducheon.
When he went to Deokjeong Station early the next morning, the soldiers were loading their kits onto a train and making ready to move toward Uijeongbu. The station master saw him and spoke.
"Ki-jo, there's no work today. Go on home. Looks like the army pulled out of Dongducheon overnight. Just now the order came down for the Deokjeong staff to withdraw to Uijeongbu Station as well."
Whether he had sat up all night at the station or not, the station master's face was drawn and gray. All the way home, Ki-jo turned over what he ought to do.
Even the station master is running…… Should I run too……?
As he came into the yard, Soonrye hurried out to meet him.
"Dear, everyone at the landlord's packed their things and fled to Seoul."
"They did?"
In that moment Ki-jo made up his mind.
If I keep the land the landlord left behind, later they might give me the steward's place—the man who manages the tenants in the landlord's stead…….
"Let's flee to Uijeongbu too."
"No. Enough of that. We'll stay."
Yang Soonrye looked at that husband of hers and felt sick at heart.
By afternoon the People's Army had flooded all the way into Deokjeong-ri. An officer gathered the villagers in one place and launched into a speech.
"From this day on, land will be given to every one of you. I understand the landlord bastards have run off. That land has no owner now."
Lee Ki-jo thought he had done well to remain in Deokjeong-ri.
"One condition—we have to take the whole of Korea. Every man with the strength to hold a rifle, step forward. There is no compulsion. I give you my word, here and now: land will be paid only to the fighters who come forward for the liberation of the nation!"
In that instant his eyes met Soonrye's, the baby in her arms. She shook her head and stared at him with a look that forbade it utterly. Ki-jo was about to ignore his wife's eyes and take one step forward when Mr. Kim, the senior dockhand he had worked beside at Deokjeong Station, seized his wrist and held it fast.
"Don't step out……."
He whispered it, low.
Lee Ki-jo gently shook the hand off.
"Hyung. I mean to have land."
And he walked to the front of the platform where the North Korean officer stood. Soonrye burst into tears.
Two months later, Ki-jo was on the Nakdong River front.
At Osan in Gyeonggi they had met the Americans and fought them, but the big-nosed Yankees were driven back by People's Army tanks, took heavy losses, and ran. Cheonan, Cheongju, Daejeon—occupied in a flash. He grew certain the war would not last long. At Daejeon an American major general had even been taken prisoner.
Once they came down through Daegu to the Nakdong, though, the People's Army could advance no farther. With the river between them, both sides began to spend men at a terrible rate. A terror took hold of Ki-jo that one more week of fighting here and he, too, would be dead.
The ROK Army, which had looked ready to collapse at any moment, now had American backing and pounded the People's Army day after day with artillery and aircraft. He did not regret having joined. The men who had not stepped forward that day were beaten savagely and dragged in later all the same, and once dragged in they were not treated well. But when the order came down for his unit to cross the Nakdong and break the ROK line, regret found him at last. He grieved that on the night of June 25 he should have fled to Uijeongbu, just as Yang Soonrye had said.
The breakthrough was to begin at dawn. Ki-jo decided the chance to undo his wrong choice had come, and he resolved to desert that night.
At two in the morning, in the gap when the sentries changed, he did not return to the unit. He started running along the northern face of the mountain.
"Where are you going?"
The soldier who had stood the watch with him shouted.
"Stop right there, you bastard!"
Ki-jo's comrade was a communist to the bone. He came at a run to catch the deserting man.
Damn it…….
Ki-jo did everything he could to throw off the soldier on his heels. Then the shot came, and a pain like fire tore through his shoulder.
"Ghk……."
Lee Ki-jo pitched forward. He tried to rise and could not draw a proper breath—the bullet had gone in at the shoulder, struck bone, bent, and torn through a lung. A wet cough broke from him, and blood welled out of his mouth in thick pulses. The soldier who had placed that first shot looked down at him and set the muzzle against his face.
"You reactionary son of a bitch. Ran all that way just to save your own skin?"
Ki-jo hauled in a ragged breath.
"S-save me…… I thought of my boy, he's only a year old, and for a second I just—look at what's become of me. Let me off, just this once……."
"I don't need to hear it! You son of a whore! Trash like you is better off dead with your skull blown open……."
Ki-jo wept and begged. He did not want to die. If only he could go back to June 25……. If, that morning, he could take his wife and his son and flee to Uijeongbu, he thought there was no price he would not pay.
"Please, stop!"
In the instant the People's Army soldier pulled the trigger, twelve golden numerals rose before his eyes, set like the face of a clock.