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CHAPTER 9
One
Joel came to Seoul on Thursday, the fifteenth of May, to catch a train to Kwangju, there to be reunited with Paul. In his backpack he carried his portable shortwave radio, which had lately become his constant companion. His bus from Anyang traced a circuitous course through Seoul’s southern suburbs and finally joined a mass of traffic on Taepyong Street, the eight-lane boulevard which, a mile south of the Capitol, passed directly in front of Seoul Station.
Traffic slowed to a crawl a couple of blocks before the station, which was unusual for mid-afternoon. Joel roused himself from reading and listened to the conversation of his fellow passengers. They spoke excitedly, in low tones, as schoolchildren do when they talk about misbehaving classmates who are sure to catch punishment. "Look at those guys—Where are they going?—He’s got a stick, see?—What’s he going to do with a big stick like that?—Look, they all have ’em!"
Joel looked out. Clusters of young men strode along the street confidently like frisky stallions, calmly accepting the awed stares of passers-by.
"What’s going on?" he whispered.
The view of Seoul Station and its broad plaza answered his question. The plaza, which Joel estimated to be the size of a ballpark, was packed with people in a restless, undulating sea of faces. The crowd overflowed the plaza and spilled out onto the street. He opened a window to listen: the low cacophany of a multitude of slogans all shouted at once, buzzed about. "Burn General Chon!—Trash the Yushin Constitution!—Democracy and Justice!"
Traffic ground to a halt. "I won’t get my train today," Joel muttered, and he set out to walk the remaining mile to the Peace Corps office. By the time he reached the first intersection above the train station, traffic on Taepyong Street had begun to thin out. He surmised that traffic blockades had been set up nearby.
The unmistakable rumble of diesel engines appeared from around a corner and grew louder as armoured personnel carriers and buses sped in close formation to cleared areas of the street. Riot police filed out. They wore the familiar grey-green body armour, wide-flanged helmets, and heavy boots. They also wore gas masks and carried large metal shields. Shiny black jeeps pulled up behind them, their roll bars mounted with tear gas generators.
The appearance of the police caused a stir among the students. The chanting stopped abruptly, then just as quickly began again with renewed intensity.
The riot police hung back, watching and waiting for reinforcements. Clusters of students began to march brazenly up toward City Hall and beyond, on the same street, to the Capitol. More joined in. A large triangular intersection, bounded by the Seoul Plaza Hotel, City Hall, and the old Doksu Palace, appeared to be their first destination.
Joel followed along with the students, only because he could not break away from them. The press of students around him was so great that he could hardly move. The best he could do was keep pushing slowly toward the edge of the crowd, hoping to escape down a side street and take refuge in the British Embassy nearby.
A woman at his side screamed through cupped hands: "Kill General Chon! Kill him! Rip his guts out!"
Traffic had now completely cleared out of Taepyong Street. A double line of riot police, backed by tear gas generators, stood along the east side of the street. The students lined the west side in disordered masses. They taunted the police by making brief forays into the middle of the street to hurl stones. The police stood expectantly, poised to move.
The order came when a pack of two dozen students entered the street not far from City Hall Plaza. They pranced into the street, whooping it up, emboldened by the police’s stillness. Barely had they reached the middle, however, when a squad sprinted toward them and, easily surrounding them, fell upon them with heavy batons. Three students were left lying on the pavement, hardly moving. Four were captured and hustled roughly behind the lines of police. The rest retreated, yelping with pain and fright, clutching broken arms and bleeding heads.
The incident spurred the students to another attack. Shouting angrily, they moved in bigger groups into the street. The police response was larger, too, and netted more students into custody with each short pursuit.
Joel watched the spectacle with numb fascination. On the students’ side, there was chaos; on the police’s, order. Both sides seemed to be probing the other, testing reactions to their actions.
Suddenly a voice, amplified through a bullhorn, shouted an order, and those police who had not yet put their gas masks over their faces quickly did so. Another order got the tear gas generators on the black jeeps turned on. The jeeps started running along the street’s centre lanes, leaving thick white gas trails behind them.
A tickling sensation in Joel’s throat erupted into searing pain. His eyes flooded with tears, and caustic mucus poured freely from his nose. He stumbled blindly to the side of a nearby building. The students who had tied wet handkerchiefs around their faces fared better than the others in the clouds of gas; only slightly disabled, they carried their rocks to within throwing distance of the police, let them loose, and scurried back to the masses of their own lines. Those who came unprepared for the gas hacked and sputtered, crying out in pain; most of them had experienced tear gas before, as Joel had during his years in college, but this gas was different. It burned the lungs so much that the students nearly lost the ability to run. Joel caught the eye of one sufferer. His look told a story of shock and fear. "What is this?" he managed to utter through a fit of coughing.
The gas worked well for the short term: the students retreated to the side streets and forced the stranded civilians to run even faster to get away from them. The police did not pursue them beyond the students’ side of the street. They quickly returned to their own lines.
Joel ran to an alleyway just off the main street. There he found a cluster of students, about fifty in number, standing quietly, watching. Most had found something to cover their faces with. They seemed to be resting. He stood with them, relieved to be in a relatively quiet spot. He used the moment to take his handkerchief from his pocket, wet it from a helpful student’s canteen, and press it against his face.
"Kaja! Let’s go!" One of the students raised his fist and, with a deafening war whoop, led the entire lot out onto the street. They carried Joel along like a cork on a wave. He had gone many yards out onto the street before he knew what had happened; with great effort he fought his way out of the rear of the ambush and ran back to the alley, more out of breath than before.
As the fighting increased in intensity, time moved ever more slowly. The two sides lost themselves in war lust. More and more students, their reactions slowed by exertion and the effects of the gas, got caught by the police. They were beaten mercilessly in the street, in full view of their comrades at the curb, then hustled into buses to bleed and moan while the police went back for more. They would not get medical attention for hours. The police flaunted their brutality. One very tall member of the squad brought a dazed student into the street and, while staving off a shower of rocks with his shield, kicked him in the groin and the head until his heavy boots sent him in a motionless lump to the pavement. He and the policemen around him pantomimed laughter and dragged the student back behind their lines, leaving a swath of blood behind them. Other policemen along the line watched the spectacle and repeated it.
A line of abandoned buses was parked at the curb not far from where Joel stood. An excited shout came from a band of students near one of them. "The keys!" they said. "The keys are still in this one!" They pried open the door and scrambled in. With a sputter and a belch of smoke out of the tailpipe, the blue-and-white bus came to life. Cheers and chanting followed it as the student in the driver’s seat ground through its gears and sent it careening across the street, nearly out of control. Joel watched in horror. Whether intentionally or not—he could not tell which—the bus blind-sided a squad of police. The ‘thud-thud’ of contact with the first pair of policemen and the flopping of a body beneath the wheels carried sickeningly to Joel’s side of the street. Some of the students around him gasped in horror, but most went into a paroxysm of cheering that turned to rage when the bus finally ground to a halt and came under attack. The hapless driver and his passengers were literally thrown out of the bus. Their heads crashed against the pavement. The policemen surrounded them and rained kicks and punches on them. All this was done in full view of the students. When the police left, all that would remain of the deed would be the many red splotches dotting Taepyong Street that day.
Joel had seen enough. More than enough.
He rushed away along with a cluster of middle-aged men to a nearby subway station. The closest one was outside the Seoul Plaza Hotel. He tried to descend with them into the station, but his way was blocked by hundreds of refugees eager to leave as quickly as they could. He fought his way down into the packed ticket area. Some people shoved change into the booths and ran to the turnstiles without waiting for their tickets; others vaulted through without paying.
A fresh wave of gas tainted the air. Joel had forgotten that tear gas is heavier than air and will sink to high concentrations in low areas. Soon the rush of people reversed and became a stampede trying to get out. The station spit him out into bright sunshine. The students, their noses and mouths covered desperado-style with handkerchiefs, waved truncheons and hurled rocks, but held to a line along the west side of the street. The police commanded the east side.
However, he found himself now on the same side of the street as the police, and well behind their positions: he had been turned around underground and had crossed the street down there. Being upwind of the action, the gas was not so bad and the area was scattered with curious onlookers.
Mark Follett was there, pacing briskly back and forth, straining to see.
"Joel! Hey, Joel! Over here. Can you believe it? Can you believe it? This is big, man. It’s big."
"Were you over there?" Joel asked. "Did you see the fighting?"
"Well, no ... but you did? Hell! Tell me about it. What did you see?"
Joel knew that Mark wanted to be appalled, to be entertained by talk of a demolition derby. He shook his head. "I want a drink." They ran a few blocks further east to the vast underground shopping complex beneath the Choson Hotel.
"What is this place?" he wondered as he descended into a darkened cocktail lounge. Clusters of well-dressed businessmen, many of them Westerners, huddled in conversations over drinks, talking calmly about matters that did not seem to excite them. A pianist in the corner tinkled out an easygoing version of a current Barry Manilow tune. Joel and Mark quietened down somewhat in the somnolent, smug atmosphere.
"Hell, I wish that guy on the piano’d find something else to play," Mark whispered. "So what did you see out there? Molotov cocktails? The thing with the bus?"
"You don’t want to know," Joel replied, "and I really don’t want to talk about it."
"Come on. Can’t you see how amazing all this is? It’s incredible!"
Just then a commotion began outside the smoked glass wall that separated the lounge from the arcade’s walkway. A student, his eyes red and swollen and his head streaked with blood, fell against the outside of the glass and slumped to the floor, leaving a long red smear behind. Most of the customers gasped but did nothing to help; a couple of them laughed nervously. Joel shook his head in disbelief. "They have no idea what’s going on out there," he muttered to Mark. "These ignorant bastards sit in here making their deals, drinking together, having fun, and just down the street the biggest upheaval in years is killing and maiming people. I don’t believe this. I don’t believe this."
More students, all battle-weary and carrying rocks or sticks, and helping each other along, started pouring into the underground arcade. The pianist stopped playing. Several of the businessmen gingerly side-stepped the intruders and went away. The bartender, a normally relaxed man whom everyone called ‘Johnny’, muttered bleakly that the democracy movement was about to drive him out of business.
"They’re gonna send us home," Mark stated flatly. He could not take his eyes off the muffled flow of injured students. "With all this going on, Peace Corps has got to send us home."
Two
Seoul was quiet the next day. According to the international news that Joel monitored with his shortwave radio, the government had publicly renewed its promise to reform the Yushin Constitution and allow free elections. In response, the students called off further demonstrations for the time being, content that they had made their point. They also were recovering their strength: according to the BBC, about two hundred students had been seriously injured yesterday. And that was only in Seoul—riots had also broken out in Taegu, Kwangju, Chonju, and several other cities, each with its own multitude of casualties.
He took the first available expressway bus to Kwangju. Paul and Mi Jin waited for him downtown on the front portico of the Catholic Centre, taking refuge from a warm spring shower. He saw them first from a distance, unaware of his presence. They looked for all the world like newlyweds. He ran up and embraced them warmly.
Paul looked haggard. He sported a wiry red beard and had developed crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. He was gaunt, but Joel could not say that he looked unhealthy; on the contrary, he had never seen him so fit. It had to do with the look in his eyes, he concluded, an appearance of amused world-weariness that gave him a look of sagacity.
It suddenly struck Joel that Paul, who had always looked up to him as a man of experience, had now stripped him of that distinction. The events of the past few weeks, and Paul’s current status as a fugitive, had turned the tables on him.
"Leslie’s coming, too," Joel said. "She should be here any minute. You heard about the riot in Seoul?" The happy mood of their reunion dissipated like mist under the sun. "I was there. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before."
"We had a big demo here, too," Paul said. "Somebody estimated twenty thousand students. We didn’t take part."
Leslie arrived just then. She caught sight of him from the bottom of the steps and stopped, looking as if she had seen a ghost. Paul ran to her and gave her a hug that was as much to comfort as to welcome.
"Yes, it really is me," he chuckled as he led her to the portico. "You remember Mi Jin, don’t you?"
"Of course."
The four left the Catholic Centre and walked up Kumnam Street toward the Provincial Office, or Capitol, which looked like a haphazard stack of nondescript white boxes at the terminus of the boulevard. Army tanks stood at the street corners and riot police idled the time away beside their buses in the nearby alleyways.
"Don’t go looking for an inn," Paul said. "You can stay at ours."
They turned into one of the smaller streets off Kumnam Street and walked slowly through a vast open-air city market. It was larger than its counterparts in most cities, stretching many blocks parallel to the main street. "You haven’t seen Korea until you’ve browsed the Kwangju Market," Paul smiled. He led them past stalls of every imaginable thing for sale: grains, ordinary and exotic seafood, cloth, pottery, roasted pig heads—and raw sea slugs ready to be eaten on the spot. The smell of cooking hung heavily on the air. The crowds moving through the narrow street on the busy Friday afternoon were enormous, but Paul strolled among the people with a confidence and easy grace that Joel had never before seen in him; he stopped here for some cheerful repartee with a woman selling sprouted mung beans; there to sample a piece of blood sausage offered by a smiling old man who all the while watched the antics of two toddlers, his grandchildren. Paul and Mi Jin were known and liked among the shopkeepers.
Paul stopped at a streetside tent that served fried ‘mandu’ dumplings and motioned to the others. "Let’s have lunch. I’m starving.
"We were expecting you yesterday," he continued after placing the order. "You couldn’t get out of Seoul because of the riot?"
Joel described it to him, from the stopping of his bus to the scene in the Choson Hotel shopping arcade. "I tried to stay out of the action, but I have to tell you, there were times I wanted to jump in with the students and fight with them. The police were brutal. They had no reason to do the things they did."
"I felt that way, too; a lot of the fighting here in Kwangju went on right under our window. But I can’t get involved, obviously. If I get caught, it’s especially bad for me. And as for Mi Jin—she’s just not as involved as she used to be."
Mi Jin, who had been talking with Leslie about news from Chindo, looked up at the mention of her name.
"I am interested, but not active. The help I give to the students is moral support and prayer. Besides," she playfully ruffled Paul’s hair, "this friend of yours needs constant looking after."
Joel shook his head in disbelief. These two people had lost their jobs because of ‘political’ activity—having acted with or on behalf of the very people who were emerging from the riots bruised and bleeding—yet they behaved like young lovers who cared nothing about the world beyond themselves. He was disappointed.
"I know what you are thinking," Mi Jin cut in. "You are thinking, ‘She has turned away from the democracy movement’. That is not true. I care deeply about it. I have worked very hard for the movement all through college and beyond—for over five years now. Now I just want to take a rest. I want to lead a normal life. There is nothing wrong with that, and I will return to the movement when I’m needed. Until then, I still have many friends among the students and organisers. They know I support them."
She spoke without heat, but Joel felt himself chastised for not seeing the subtleties of their situation.
"What’s going on now?" Leslie asked. "What are your friends telling you?"
"It looks like the government is being more moderate: we have been promised quicker reforms of the Yushin Constitution. Since that is one of the main things we wanted, the leaders of the movement cancelled today’s demos. For now, they are waiting to see what happens next."
Three
The Tongbu Express Bus Terminal in Taegu was unusually quiet, even for a Sunday morning. Martin Budzinski noticed it the moment he stepped through the door and strode, unimpeded by crowds, to the ticket window. The snack kiosks were closed. He racked his memory for some holiday he had forgotten about, but came up with nothing.
"A ticket for Kwangju, please?" he asked. The young ticket agent behind the glass ignored him. She sat well away from the window, filing her nails and chatting with a friend.
"Shilehamnida. Excuse me." He rapped the window lightly with his knuckles.
The girl looked up, annoyed, and pointed with her nail file at a sheet of paper taped to the window beside him. He could understand only a few words of it. A man in a grey suit saw him and translated it into broken English:
"Informations. By the order of Martial Law Command, bus service is quitted ... ?"
"Suspended, maybe?"
"Ah, yes. Thank you ... suspend for Sunday, May eighteen, nineteen hundred eighty. Maybe they want everybody to go church!" The man laughed, and the lights of the terminal glinted dully on his dental work.
"I wonder what’s going on." Martin thought aloud.
"Soldiers." The man stopped laughing and chuckled the way Koreans often do when they are nervous. "Soldiers taking all the buses somewheres."
Four
Chong Il Man, Lee Byong Guk, and others on the Kwangju Students’ Council fidgeted in a faculty lounge at Chonnam University on the same Sunday morning. A fellow student, still out of breath from a wild ride through the city on his motor-scooter, sat beside them, telling them what he had seen.
"The convoy split up about a mile from the expressway coming into the city, close to where my parents live. I don’t know where the smaller part went, but I followed the larger part downtown. They stopped at the end of Kumnam Street, on the far end from the Provincial Office. I didn’t see anyone get out. They just sat there, hundreds of soldiers, waiting for something. Then I came here."
Il Man did not wait for him to finish; by the time he was halfway through the story he was already on the telephone to Seoul. Time slowed and then seemed to stop while they waited for a friend to answer. The others in the room smoked cigarettes with long shaky puffs.
"Hello? Yes, hello?" Il Man listened for a moment, then slammed the receiver down.
"Shit! It wasn’t him. And the voice sounded much older, someone I’ve never heard before. They caught him. Shit!"
At almost the same time a student at the far end of the room, who had been listening to the radio, broke in. "Listen to this!"
The news from one of the local stations was read by an unfamiliar voice who practically barked it out, as if commanding its audience to listen. It said that martial law had been broadened to cover the entire country, including the island of Cheju. The colleges and universities were to be closed indefinitely, effective immediately. Political gatherings of every kind and labour strikes were prohibited. The nation’s newspapers and broadcast stations were to be watched for ‘false reporting’ of the news. The decree, read in a husky, imperious tone by the Information Minister, ended with a warning: "Anyone who violates these rules, promulgated hereby as Martial Law Decree 10, shall be severely dealt with."
"You damned fools!" Lee Byong Guk screamed. "You fucking morons! Didn’t I tell you this would happen? Didn’t I tell you that General Chon is a damned snake? He dished out some sweet talk about reforms and elections and all that shit just to keep us quiet while he moved his troops into position. How could you trust that son of a bitch? Eh? How could you?"
Il Man ignored Byong Guk and turned to the rider of the scooter. "Where did you say the troops were?"
"Last I saw them, they were downtown."
"No doubt a portion of them have broken off to handle ‘hot spots’. So it’s only a matter of time before they make it here to the edge of the city," Il Man said. He peered out the window toward the university’s main gate. "If they aren’t here already."
Another student, his face red with exertion, bolted into the room. "I just got off the telephone with a friend in Seoul. He’s in the student union at Korea University. There was a strategy meeting at Ehwa University last night—a big one, over a hundred people. The police raided them with tear gas and batons, smashing everything in sight. My friend had to break a window and jump out the back to escape."
This new revelation raised the tension in the room to a new height. They spoke now in soft, strangled voices, tinged with fear.
"How many did they get?" Il Man asked.
"Twenty or thirty. He didn’t know for sure. They put them on a bus and drove them away. Some of them were unconscious and never got medical care. That’s what my friend heard. He was running for his life with the others."
"We’ve got to do something now!" Byong Guk broke in. "We’ve heard enough. General Chon’s asking for it—now it’s time to give it to him. No more appeasement or compromise. It’s time to struggle!"
Il Man controlled his sense of shame as best he could. Byong Guk reminded him of how badly he misjudged the government. "I pray it’s not too late. Let’s all get on the phones. We have to gather as many friends as we can as quickly as possible. If they want a fight, we’ll give them a big one. They’re not going to shut down this university, and they’re not going to enforce that evil decree without a fight. Let’s get organised. Martial law ends with us!"
Five
Joel was visibly shaken when he showed up for Sunday breakfast.
"I’ve been listening to the news on the shortwave, guys. There’s trouble. Big trouble. Maybe we should think about moving to the countryside for a while." He told Leslie, Paul, and Mi Jin about the events of the previous night.
"There have been a lot of arrests. Kim Dae Jung. His grown son. Kim Jong Pil, the former Prime Minister—he’s the head of the ruling party, for heaven’s sake. Several members of Kim Yong Sam’s party. A Reverend Mun, who’s a popular religious leader. A former Army Chief of Staff under President Pak. Businessmen, politicians, former ambassadors, the list goes on. Big, important names."
"What about the students? The student leaders?" Mi Jin gasped.
"The police raided some meeting late last night in Seoul." Joel told what he knew, including the escape of most of them. "We’ve got to be careful. Martial law has been extended. It covers the whole country, top to bottom, including Cheju Island, and there’s a whole raft of new restrictions. You can bet the students will be out in force to protest this."
The four of them rushed outside to have a look around.
Kumnam Street was quiet in the late morning sun. A few bands of students milled about on the street corners listening to radios and arguing among themselves. Most of the people walking about that morning had just got out of church and were roaming through the market in their Sunday clothes with their children, buying food for their dinners, all but oblivious to the events of the night before. Mi Jin smiled at a little girl in a yellow dress who was playfully hiding from her grandmother among large bins of grain and beans.
"It all looks pretty normal to me," Leslie said hopefully.
Angry shouts suddenly erupted from the middle of Kumnam Street. About thirty students marched together toward the Provincial Office shouting slogans, tentatively at first, but gaining strength as their numbers slowly grew.
"Release Kim Dae Jung! Release the student leaders!" they chanted. "Down with martial law!"
They had marched only one block when an armoured personnel carrier rolled around the corner from the ‘Sangmukwan’, the Army Reserve office, and squealed to a halt before them like a heavy, squat insect. A tear gas generator was mounted on its roof. A squad of riot police in full protective gear followed it at a quick trot. The moment they stopped, the tear gas exploded from the top of the personnel carrier in a flurry of sparks. Several of the police also had tear gas launchers, and they fired off rounds of canisters that traced purposeful arcs above the street and landed among the people watching from the curb. The onlookers scattered and poured into the market. The students broke up, then regrouped. Several of them ran to a construction site nearby to pick up rocks and bits of cement. They dashed through the clouds of gas, hurled their weapons at the police, then beat a hasty retreat to the curb.
Mi Jin and the Americans ran away, gasping for breath. Billowing clouds of tear gas, wafted far afield by a strong spring breeze, fell like a white blanket over the entire length of the market.
"Hey!" "What’s going on?" Coughing and shouts of dismay rose from the narrow street. Men in pressed suits, women in satin ‘hanboks’, and children roiled about among the stalls like ants in a mound that had suddenly been sprayed with smoke. They poured through the side streets and emerged along the length of Kumnam Street, coughing and spitting, angry as hornets, growing angrier with each new canister of gas that landed in their midst.
The police responded to the growing crowd with astounding nonchalance. One policeman, a lean, jumpy man who swung his armour about with abandon, broke ranks and ran to the crowd along one curb, shaking his fist, taunting the people, practically asking to be pelted with rocks. They obliged. His fellow officers responded with more tear gas, and this further enraged them. Within an hour, this game had brought traffic to a complete halt. Kumnam Street swelled with an infuriated throng trapped among buses and cars that could not move.
Mi Jin and her friends stood in front of the Catholic Centre; Kumnam Street, alive with over a thousand scrambling people of all ages, stretched out in the distance before them. She narrowed her eyes as she looked out, then uttered a cry. A green line of men had formed at the far end of the street, about a half mile away. They advanced, and as they got closer it became apparent that they were not riot police, but soldiers in combat gear. White bands were tied around their helmets; they wielded heavy black batons.
"Paratroopers!" Mi Jin cried. "See? Special Forces!"
"Hell. This is too much. We’d better get back to our rooms," Joel said.
The crowd around them had grown bigger as time passed. Most were ordinary people and families driven out of the market by tear gas, but students comprised a growing portion. They carried banners and chanted slogans as they pushed themselves to the front of the pack. A cluster of students soon took up positions opposite the straight green line.
Paul heard a distant command: "Get them!" and the soldiers began running toward the crowd. The students at the edge scrambled to retreat, but they ran up against the inner crowd that had not yet reacted to the charge. Before anyone could escape, the soldiers waded into them, waving their batons savagely in every direction, hitting whatever got in their way. The people in their path scratched ever more desperately to get away, but the press of abandoned cars hemmed them in. Some still managed to break out. The soldiers broke ranks and pursued them in pairs up the street and into the alleyways. On the people they caught they rained heavy blows with their batons; then they moved on in pursuit of others. The older people, and those whose movements were restricted by their traditional clothes, were the first to fall, bleeding and clutching their heads. A few lay motionless. Ones who were hit but could get back on their feet ran into the alleys, blood coursing down their heads and soaking their clothes.
Joel grabbed Leslie’s arm and ran. Paul and Mi Jin followed close behind. A knot of a dozen students followed them. Behind them they heard the sharp ‘clop clop clop clop’ of treaded boots upon the concrete pavement. A moment later a scream told them that a couple of the students had got caught and been mowed down; they dared not pause to turn and see.
The heavy footsteps recovered their rhythm and continued to gain on them.
They approached a small supermarket as they turned a corner. Joel called to the others and they threw themselves through the open door. Running past the surprised shopkeeper, they found the back of the store and stopped, desperately gasping for breath, inside the darkened stock room. The pair of footsteps slowed down and entered the store. Harsh questions were asked of the shopkeeper. He tried to gather the words to answer, but at that moment a fresh scurrying of runners flew past the door. The soldiers quit the store and were gone.
"You in the back! Get out of my store!" the shopkeeper yelled. "Those soldiers almost beat the shit out of me because of you!"
Paul poked his head out of the stock room. "We’ll leave, sir, but only if your back door is open."
The shopkeeper grumbled but acceded to the polite request. "Go! I’m closing up."
They worked their way slowly up the winding alley to their own neighbourhood, where they hoped to find safety in their inn. At every sound of quickened footsteps, even imagined ones, they tensed and made ready to run. Now and then they heard groans and saw splashes of blood, but they never stopped for long until they came upon an old woman sitting on the ground. Her hair was matted with blood and she moaned piteously. The lovely grey satin of her ‘hanbok’ was torn and dirtied.
"Grandmother," Mi Jin said. She knelt down and pried the woman’s hand from her head while Joel examined the wound. "Please don’t cry. We will help you."
"Those sons of bitches! Those jackbooted bastards, look what they’ve done to me. ‘Owwww, owww’ ... my head hurts."
"She’s got a nasty bump," Joel said, "but she’ll be okay."
The woman looked up at the sound of his voice. "Miguk salam? Americans? What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be seeing this. ‘Owwwww’. I was just going home from church, damn it. First they gas us, then they come beat us up. What did we do to them? They’re devils, I tell you. The dirty bastards are sons of the devil ... " Paul knelt down and Joel lifted her onto his friend’s back, piggy-back style.
"Come with us, Grandmother," Paul said. "We’ll find you a doctor."
The nearest clinic was a three-story building whose sign advertised the services of a team of general practitioners. A mob of twenty or thirty wounded people and bystanders had gathered on the street outside. Several were beating on the locked door.
Joel saw some movement behind a window on the second floor. He threw a stone at the window and broke it. A head appeared, shouting angrily.
"Let us in!" Paul cried. "There are injured people here!"
"Are you crazy?" the man in the window screamed back. "What if the bastards find out that I opened my doors to rebels? Eh? They’re put me out of my practice and arrest me!"
It took time and a number of vicious threats to get the doctor to open his doors; after the people came in, he locked the door behind them. "This is all we’re taking," the doctor said as he took stock of the range of injuries before him. "And whatever you do, don’t tell anyone where you got treated."
Horror followed horror as the afternoon gave way to evening. Brutality fed upon itself: it hung over the city and seeped into every corner like an immense cloud of tear gas, burning up the senses and scrambling rational thought. The paratroopers never let up. Pairs of them made sudden, lightning-quick forays into groups of onlookers, swinging their batons. They never came back empty-handed: a student or some other young person was always dragged away, bleeding and limping, driven by blows. Once in custody, the men were made to strip down to their underwear and lie face down on the street until a transport truck arrived. These attacks were made not in the semi-dark privacy of some alleyway but on bright street corners along Kumnam Street in full view of onlookers. The paratroopers took pains to put on a show of bravado. They ignored the deep rumbling and occasional catcalls from the people around them. When each batch of prisoners was safely in custody they made more forays into the street, and so followed this procedure time after time until dark.
Paul, Mi Jin, Joel, and Leslie got home just before the nine o’clock curfew fell on the city. By nine-thirty the streets were as quiet as a tomb, deserted by all but soldiers and riot police. The four sat together in the small room that Paul and Mi Jin shared. No one spoke; they ate a dinner that the landlady had made for them hours ago but had since grown cold. Mi Jin fought back tears. Leslie comforted her as best she could while she herself shook uncontrollably. Even Joel had lost the power to be cynical, much less try to make an affectation of it: he could not believe all the things he had seen that day, nor could he yet grasp that those sights had shaken him to the core.
Only Paul seemed calm. He stood by the room’s only window, sometimes looking up at the moon, sometimes watching the narrow street below. He touched his fingertips to his thumb, as if making calculations. Joel got up and joined him.
"What are you thinking?" Joel whispered. "A way to get out?"
Paul looked at his friend as if he had said something in Swahili.
"Out of where? Not Kwangju. You’re kidding, right?"
" ... No."
"I can’t leave Kwangju. If I leave I’d leave Mi Jin, too, and I’m not ready to do that."
"But you’re in danger here," Joel persisted.
"I’m in danger wherever I go. No place is really safe except this room, with her. I’ll stay as long as I can."
Six
Paul and Mi Jin left their room early the next morning and went straight to the Chonnam University campus. They saw clouds of tear gas billowing up over the main gate long before the gate itself came into view. The taxicab driver, who had taken back roads the entire distance from downtown, stopped a mile from their destination and refused to go nearer. "They’ve been stopping taxis and beating drivers," he said, "because they think we’ve been carrying students around."
"Then why are you giving us a ride?" Mi Jin asked.
"Because I hate those sons of bitches as much as you do." He grinned a gap-toothed smile. "Besides, at the first sign of trouble, I would have dumped you and lit out of here as fast as I could. No offence. Just being honest with you."
The pair worked their way around the edge of the conflict that was brewing outside the wall that surrounded the university. The students were trying to get in and the soldiers were blocking their way. Once Paul and Mi Jin worked their way well into the crowd of students—Paul estimated several tens of thousands along this road alone—they joined in the surprisingly well organised give and take of street fighting. The front lines of students charged the standing line of paratroopers, throwing rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails in small sections jabbing out into the street—like bee stings. The paratroopers responded with a charge toward the crowd; their tactic was to surround small cells of demonstrators, isolate them by chasing them down alleyways, and then drag as many as they could back behind their lines. The students tried to dilute the soldiers’ force by attacking them on several fronts at once. This went on for hours in the bright morning sunlight.
Paul never lost sight of Mi Jin. He watched her constantly. Both had covered their faces with wet bandannas, like bandits, to help them bear the tear gas that swirled in the air like a heavy fog. Mi Jin’s eyes, red-rimmed and weeping from the gas, were on fire. At times Paul stopped and marvelled at this side of her that he barely knew existed. Mi Jin ran like an athlete; her small body tensed into a tough, mobile rock-launcher that nearly always hit its mark. And her language slipped into the profane, earthy patois of a coastal fisherwoman, full of ripe obscenities, which she bellowed at the top of her lungs. "This is her mother’s voice," he thought to himself.
Suddenly the crowds around them became a screaming maelstrom of people running as fast as they could away from the line of soldiers down the street.
"What’s happening?" Mi Jin shouted.
"Run! Just run!" came the answer from a woman who did not break her stride. A moment later the white-banded helmet of a paratrooper appeared in an opening in the throng, not more than twenty yards away, approaching fast. Paul caught just a glimpse of the outline of an M16 rifle and a sharply pointed object jutting out beyond its muzzle. Mi Jin grabbed his hand and dived into the crowd. As he snapped his body around to follow, his hand whipped out and brushed against something sharp. Splashes of blood on the pavement followed them as they ran with the crowd, here and there jumping over huddled bodies in their path. The paratrooper pursued them for a few steps, then went after a slower student, a short-legged woman wearing a pink sweater and blue jeans. He lunged at her with his bayonet and she crumpled to the ground like a marionette whose strings had been cut. He paused to pull out his weapon, then got his footing back and went on.
Paul and Mi Jin scrambled into the first alleyway they could find and followed its winding course deep into an impoverished neighbourhood. The area was deserted. The clatter of pursuing footsteps never left them; they could not be sure whether they belonged to paratroopers or to others like themselves. The concrete walls played tricks on their hearing, amplifying and distorting the sounds in a mad echo chamber: corners that seemed to conceal running feet revealed an empty alley when they turned to look, while others that had sounded quiet were suddenly rounded by terrified students.
They paused for a moment, listened, then looked at each other. Paul had panic in his eyes and his face was pale and sweaty. His hand began to throb with pain.
"You’ve been hurt!" Fear quickly left Mi Jin. She cradled his hand. A three-inch gash splayed across his knuckles; the outer skin separated as a red trough that still bled. She searched her pockets and came up with a handkerchief, which she tied tightly over the wound. "We’ve got to get you to a doctor for stitches."
They joined hands and went back into the maze of alleys. The sound of footsteps sent them running again this way and that first up one alley, then down another until they were completely lost. They ran until Paul tripped over a soft obstacle and went flying.
"Oof!"
He regained his senses when Mi Jin screamed. He raised his eyes to stare into the face of a prone figure, its face covered with blood, on which he had fallen. It did not move. He jumped up quickly.
The body was next to a pile of twelve others, all motionless, blood flowing in a stream into a drainage ditch beside them. They were stacked like firewood, heads all at one end, some on their backs, some on their stomachs.
The sound of traffic and rough voices filtered up the ally. They were close to a larger street.
"Hey ... one of them’s moving!" Paul cried. A young man with rough, stubby features, wearing a schoolboy’s camouflaged school uniform, stirred. Another body of a much larger man lay on top of him, and he tried unconsciously to push it away as a sleeping child would move a heavy blanket. He groaned softly.
They moved to the mound of bodies and grasped the one on top. It was heavy. They struggled with it for several minutes before they could roll it to one side.
"Yah!" A harsh voice shot out from the street.
"Damn it!" Paul’s eyes followed the sound of footsteps. A paratrooper brandished a baton and bore down on them with long strides.
"Jong Shik, we have to go. Come on!" Mi Jin grabbed his arm and pulled with unnatural strength. They ran for hours and finally, past midday, found their way home.
Seven
"See this, Leslie? You have to push the skin together and pass the needle through ... "
Joel was tending to the gash across Paul’s hand in their rooms under the yellow light of a desk lamp. Paul had returned in a daze, discouraged from getting help at the hospital by the chaos he found there. Joel drew on his experience as a paramedic, bending a sewing needle and boiling it with a length of thread. He also made a mild saline solution with kitchen salt and boiled it, then used it to irrigate the wound. It was the best he could do. He worked without anaesthetics; Paul came to himself under the pain of the needle. Mi Jin held him tightly.
"Will he be all right?"
"He’ll be fine. It looks worse than it is. We need more antiseptic and dressings and antibiotics, though. And he should go to the hospital as soon as he can get in."
"There’s a drugstore around the corner," Mi Jin said. "We can get those things there."
The drugstore lit the grey street with an abundance of fluorescent light gleaming off its white counters. Huge roll-up doors hung over the front like a garage. The street was relatively quiet.
"Leslie, get some bandages and creosol and first aid stuff—whatever you can find," Joel said. "I’ll get some antibiotics. Hell, I can’t believe it: I’m actually glad they’re selling them over the counter. Paul, I could use your help.
"I was listening to the shortwave radio this morning," he whispered as they walked up an aisle. "It’s getting worse by the minute. Fifty thousand people in the riots this morning. Five hundred people arrested, five dead bodies, even a dead child. You and I know it’s far worse than that. Those bodies you saw won’t ever be brought to light."
Paul said nothing; his mind was on the bodies and the live one he could not save. Joel understood and let him alone.
Leslie and Mi Jin met them at the front counter with their arms loaded, but only with odds and ends, items that others had counted not worth buying. "This is the last of it," Leslie said. "No surprise: there’s been a run on supplies."
They were near the front of the store, near the cashier’s station, when the sound of screams and rapid footsteps approached from the street. Paul became agitated and let out a deep groan of pain.
"No! No, not again!"
A young boy, not yet out of middle school, and bleeding from an ugly gash across his face, ran crying into the store. A lone paratrooper followed him with his baton raised for another blow. The druggist started to lower the metal door. The soldier had to duck to get in.
Paul sprang upon the paratrooper with a brutish yell. He grappled with him, trying to wrest the baton from his hand. Joel stood transfixed for a moment at his friend’s impulsive act, but quickly joined him. Together they managed to hold the soldier away from the boy and push him toward the door. The soldier’s eyes widened at the sight of the foreigners, and this seemed to blunt the force of his attack. With one last shove, Paul and Joel pushed him out the door and watched him fall. The druggist, with help from Mi Jin and Leslie, slammed the door shut.
Joel saw an immediate change in Paul. Before the attack, he had been brooding over his first exposure to ugly, violent death. The clash with the paratrooper had changed his view that the attackers were bringers of death; Paul had got close enough to glimpse the eyes of this one, to see his young pockmarked face and understand that even a paratrooper could lose a fight.
"We got him," Paul exulted as the soldier ran down the alley in another direction. He beat his fists on the metal door and let out a whoop. "We knocked him on his ass!"
"Did you smell his breath?" Joel asked.
"I did. He’s been drinking. How else can a human being do the things he’s been doing?"
In days to come, as the crisis wore on, others who had been caught in close quarters with those men made the same observation.
As soon as the coast seemed clear, they left the drug store by the back entrance and made their way to the US Cultural Center, five blocks away. The Center’s high brick wall loomed impressively over the iron main gate, which was closed fast. A Korean employee stood just outside, looking at the credentials of people who tried to get in. Paul recognised a few American missionaries and aid workers on the other side. Joel, Leslie, and Paul showed their Peace Corps identification cards, and were admitted. Mi Jin was stopped.
"Are you a United States citizen?" the man asked, in English.
Mi Jin shook her head. "She’s with me, sir," Paul said, offering his passport. "I’m a citizen."
The man did not look at Paul’s credentials. "No Koreans are allowed today. Only United States citizens."
"But I told you, she’s with me. She’s ... my wife."
The man looked at him, then at her, and smirked. "Nice try, man. No exceptions."
"Joel, Leslie, you stay here. I’m leaving," Paul said. He walked out and rejoined Mi Jin.
Joel followed him out. "What?"
"I can’t leave her now."
Joel considered, then turned to Leslie. "I’m going with them."
"Come on, guys. Don’t do this to me," she pleaded.
"You’ll be safe here. Maybe you can get a bus or train out of here," Paul said. "It’ll be okay."
Leslie hesitated, crestfallen, and Joel ran back through the door. He put his arm around her and spoke gently: "Nobody will think less of you for wanting to get out of here. Taking refuge in this place is the only sane thing to do."
"But I’m going to worry about you."
"We’ll be all right. I want you safe." He kissed her forehead and went out again. She stood still, wiping away tears.
The man closed the gate.
Eight
The back streets of Kwangju became increasingly clogged with people. Surprisingly few were of college age. They were parents, siblings, and relatives of the students who had been demonstrating on the big boulevards. Mi Jin, Paul, and Joel came upon a grandmother who, confident of her invincibility as an elder and a mother-in-law, harangued a gathering of other seniors on a street corner:
"Those sons of bitches are murdering us! I don’t know about you, but I remember the Japs when they ground us all into the dirt. They never treated us this bad. They were bad, but this is ten times worse!"
Her audience murmured agreement.
"What makes it worse is that these bastards are our own people. Our own nationality, anyway—I hear they’re really all Kyongsangdo lepers. What business does a Korean have killing another Korean? Eh?"
The three moved quickly along. Paul led them at a brisk walk, almost a trot.
"Where are we going?" Joel asked.
Paul said nothing, but pressed on, as if looking for something.
"No, Paul. Not that pile of bodies! It’s under guard for sure. Even if you could get close enough to it, the man’s probably dead now. Listen to me. Let’s go home." He caught his arm and tried to pull him around.
Just then they heard the light scurrying of feet from around the corner. They hung back in a recessed doorway while a small band of students ran by, followed in a moment by a pair of paratroopers. A minute later, the sound of a beating echoed back to them. It was short but violent, and the students who got caught were herded away, groaning in pain. When Joel, Paul, and Mi Jin rounded the corner they found a few tattered bits of clothing and some fresh blood on the ground.
"Hold on," Joel shushed. "Do you hear that?"
In a small chink in the wall, deep in shadow, lay a short man who wore the white headband of a prominent student association. His headband was soaked with blood. He gripped his head and groaned. A large wooden cross hung from a leather cord around his neck.
He’s from the theological seminary," Mi Jin said, reading the slogan on his headband. "Yah! Can you stand? Let us help you."
The man did not respond; he only let go of his head and tossed it spasmodically from side to side. A dark mass of blood seeped down his back.
Joel ran his fingers gently along the back of his head and paused near the space where the skull meets the neck. "This is bad. Very bad. He needs to get to a hospital right away. It’s dangerous to move him, but we’ve got no choice."
"The University Hospital is close by," Mi Jin said.
With Paul’s help, Joel heaved the man gently onto his back. He carried him like a Korean mother carries her sleeping infant snuggled close to her back, her hands clasped under its bottom.
They did not have to ask directions to the hospital: traffic told them where it was. A fast-moving stream of bleeding humanity flowed into the hospital grounds and strove to get the most seriously injured inside. The gatekeeper had long since quit his post; he had been drafted into service inside as an orderly while the regular orderlies, those familiar with the phenomena of trauma, became nurses. Thus under the unrelenting influx of injuries, which strained the hospital to its limit, nearly everyone who worked there was promoted: orderlies became nurses, nurses worked as doctors, and all doctors became surgeons.
Don’t bring him in here!" a tiny nurse barked at Joel. "Triage is over there!" She pointed an imperious finger at the lobby to the emergency room, which had been cleared of chairs. Joel set his load on the floor upon a blood-soaked pallet beside a rack of ‘Hello Kitty’ children’s books.
"Hell," Paul whispered. "Look at this place!"
His senses reeled at the chaos around him. Everyone moved in such a jumble that his eyes could not focus on any single object for long. The screams seemed to come from the depths of hell itself. Even the smell of the place held him transfixed, for it was an odd, unreproduceable mixture of antiseptic, of excrement from the injured who had lost control of their bodily functions, and of the faintly metallic odour of blood.
Joel meanwhile was stumbling through an explanation to a nurse that he, as a paramedic, could be of great help. The nurse, who had been caught in mid-flight to an operating room, listened politely for a moment and then curtly told him to see an orderly if he had an injury. He had better luck with a doctor who hurried through next; the latter put him to work in an area which he called, with grim humour, ‘The Tailor Shop’. It was a corner where patients had their lacerations cleaned and stitched up.
"I’ve got to go. I can’t stay here," Mi Jin said. Paul first thought she meant she could not stand the sight of the injuries. It later occurred to him that she was more angry than frightened, and that the best channel for her anger was the street, fighting as before. He left with her.
Nine
The street fighting had escalated while Mi Jin and the others were at the hospital. When they emerged they saw columns of black smoke rising into the sky from burning automobiles.
A familiar voice rang out to them from a street corner while they pressed through a noisy crowd on Kumnam Street.
"Mi Jin! Yah, over here!" Chong Il Man glanced about furtively, then bounded out to meet them. His shirt had been ripped on one sleeve, and his shoulder was caked with dried blood. "Elder Sister, I heard you were dead. Thank the Lord you’re alive."
"Who told you I was dead, for heaven’s sake?"
"No one in particular. It was a rumour. Hell, the rumours are flying these days, wild ones, and everyone believes them. I’ve heard that the soldiers are drunk, or on drugs."
"That one’s true," Paul interjected. "I know."
Il Man gave him a respectful nod. "So you’ve joined the battle and seen for yourself. But that’s only one rumour that’s been proven true, and in just one case. How can we believe what we hear? The government tells lies about us. They lie to us. Our own people innocently spread half-truths that grow into something no better than a lie. We have nothing to believe in."
"Take a look around you," Mi Jin said bitterly. She pointed at another assault by a phalanx of paratroopers, just visible in the distance at the far end of the street. "Isn’t this enough?"
"Elder Sister, there’s a meeting of what’s left of the student associations. I’m on my way there now. Would you like to come? And the American can come, too. It’ll be good to have some outside corroboration of the ‘condition’ of the soldiers. I warn you, though, Pak Jong Shik. Most of the people at this meeting will hate you because you are an American, because Jimmy Carter is backing General Chon. Americans are not popular right now. I’ll vouch for you, but you have to be prepared."
A half hour later they entered an empty restaurant deep within a poor neighbourhood far from the fighting. Muscle-bound students, armed with heavy truncheons, stood guard at the front and back entrances, two at each door. They stood with the wary coiled ease with which masters of taekwondo await a challenge. The room, boisterous with argumentation, went quiet when Paul walked in.
"This is my friend Han Mi Jin, whom most of you know," he said. "And this is Mister Pak Jong Shik, a friend of mine."
Some in the room, at a separate table near an open window, sneered. "How did he get a Korean name?" one of them said. "Give me a break."
Il Man patted Paul on the shoulder and continued. "The American, as I said, is a friend. He’s on our side. I trust him."
"Ask him if his government is doing anything to stop this atrocity upon the people of Kwangju," Lee Byong Guk said.
"I don’t know," Paul replied, in Korean. "I haven’t been keeping up on my government’s actions."
"That was a rhetorical question, American. The fact is, your government is helping Chon Du Hwan and his clique by guarding the Demilitarised Zone while Chon moves his troops around. The Americans are making this crisis possible."
"No. You can’t be right."
"I am right. The United States pulls the regime’s strings in all other things. If the Americans really wanted the atrocity to end, they could end it today. All they’d have to do is give the word. They haven’t. Would you like to see what your government is responsible for?" He picked up a sheaf of large photographs and threw them down on the table in front of Paul. "Feast your eyes."
The pictures were in black and white, and still damp from the developing bath. The detail in them was devastatingly clear. They depicted piles of bodies, stacked grotesquely like firewood. One pile resembled the one he fell onto earlier. Other photographs showed stray victims splayed about on the streets like the aftermath of a tornado, their bodies left as they fell. One body was that of a boy dressed in a student’s camouflage uniform, the kind commonly worn by high school boys taking mandatory military training. He was very young.
Paul glanced at the picture, looked again, and turned white.
"Jong Shik, what’s wrong?" Mi Jin asked.
"Oh, no! I know this boy." He let out a long shuddering breath and closed his eyes.
"His name is Pak Song Min. He’s the son of my old boarding house ajumoni in Mokpo. He was a great kid, like a little brother to me." He sat down hard and blinked away tears.
One of the students, a hard-bitten engineering student from Choson University, cleared his throat.
"Welcome to the land of misery."
After a pause, someone mercifully spoke up. "So where do we stand now? Shouldn’t we be checking how many of our people are arrested, how many are killed and wounded, how many damned troops are out there? I feel lost without information."
They consulted among themselves, tallying the names of the leaders now arrested—those from whom they had not heard—and added to that number an estimate of the multitude of unnamed ones who had been seen in the hospitals.
"Well, we have a number," Il Man said finally. "But it’s surely so inaccurate that it’s almost useless. It looks like we’ve lost between fifty and sixty leaders so far, including a half-dozen from our group here and the rest from other student organisations. Arrested students in general—add another five to six hundred. That’s a conservative guess. Wounded—add another thousand. We’ve never seen such losses before."
"I know where they’re taking the ones they arrest," said one in the group. "Not to jail; there’s not enough room there. They’re holding them on the grounds of Choson and Chonnam Universities. I saw some being driven there in trucks. My aunt works at Chonnam. She says they’ve got them packed into classrooms without beds and with no food. She told me that none of them has eaten since yesterday morning. And most of them are wounded, kicked or beaten with sticks."
"We have to struggle at those spots," Byong Guk said, jumping up. "Set up demos. Let everyone know about it. Concentrate our numbers there and tell them we will not stand for it."
All present nodded in agreement, though no one believed for a moment that their demonstration would free the captives or ease their suffering in the slightest. Mi Jin prayed for a miracle.
"I need to find my friend’s body," Paul said. "Can anyone help me?"
Ten
The US Cultural Center offered Leslie a level of comfort that she had not seen in months. The library, an unadorned room with blue institutional carpeting, sturdy oak furniture, and the smell of book glue, could have been at home in any tiny college in the United States. She shared it with a dozen other Americans, all chattering about the violence with which the students were defying the government. None of them knew what they were talking about. She wanted to shout "No, no! You’ve got it all backwards. The soldiers are attacking ordinary people with clubs and bayonets! I saw them!"
After a while the Western sterility of the room became too much for her to stand: she craved some of the chaos that she had lately grown accustomed to. She left the building. A planter stand in the courtyard provided a place to sit amid the disorder of interrupted gardening. This calmed her slightly.
The odour of a distant tear gas assault wafted over the wall and stung her nose. Shouts of ‘Death to the American collaborators!’ and worse came from students occasionally as they marched past. She started crying, due in equal measure to the remnants of tear gas and to the tension that was just now finding release.
A movement nearby attracted her attention. Against the outer wall of the courtyard, perched on a large rock like an overweight sprite, sat a middle-aged American man. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt—tight around the middle—and dark slacks. He smoked an unfiltered cigarette down to its end, where it threatened to singe his fingers.
"You don’t want to sit there," he said.
"Excuse me?"
"You don’t want to sit there," he repeated. Just then a rock about the size of a softball arced over the wall and landed less than a yard from Leslie’s feet. A lone voice outside shouted an obscenity against the United States.
"That’s why. The bastards have been doing it off and on all day." He shifted his weight on the rock and adjusted his trousers around his seat, but did not invite her to sit down. "The name’s Bob. I’m with AID. That’s the Agency for International Development."
"I know. I’m Leslie. Peace Corps."
"A social worker," Bob sneered. "How come you’re not out there being a do-gooder?"
"What?"
"Well, that’s what you people do, isn’t it? Me, I don’t really give a shit about all the mess going on out there. I just want outta here. Got a wife and kid up in Seoul. They’re Americans, not Koreans. We’re gonna ship out pretty soon; I got a transfer. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me. Korea’s the pits. It’s a helluva place to live, isn’t it?"
"It’s got its good points and bad points, just like everywhere else."
"Good points? Hah!" Bob spat. "Name one. The food’s inedible. The Koreans I work with are assholes, corrupt like you wouldn’t believe. The place stinks. Hell, the whole country smells like ‘kimchi’! The Koreans, they eat that shit all the time, and then something in it comes out of their pores, like sweat. My poor wife, she almost fainted when she stepped off the plane."
"Believe me, it’s not as bad as all that." This man provoked an instant dislike in her. She had her own criticisms of the country—though milder and more delicately expressed—but she took umbrage when someone else voiced theirs, someone less entitled than she to harbour criticisms. God above, do I sound like that? she wondered. She quickly changed the subject.
"I’m surprised there aren’t many people here yet."
Bob shrugged. "They’re all at work, I guess. Most of ’em work in hospitals, you know. Kwangju is big on Catholic and Presbyterian—and I don’t know what the hell else—kinds of hospitals. Me, I don’t give a shit about this place. I’m tellin’ you the truth, now. All the people gettin’ beat up here got it coming. The government wouldn’t be steppin’ in if there wasn’t serious trouble goin’ on. Like the North Koreans. They’re behind all this. I say to hell with ’em. I got nothing keeping me here. As soon as that evacuation bus pulls up, I’ll be the first one on it."
The strange little man’s mention of the hospitals, and of the other Americans’ duty to work in them during the crisis, called to mind Joel stitching up the wounded. She suffered a sudden pang of remorse. One of her life’s few clear choices suddenly rose before her. It frightened her, because she knew that the right decision would put her back in danger. She thought of Joel, then gazed at Bob, who had paused to light his third cigarette off the stub of the second. She took a deep breath, wished him luck, and left the compound.
Eleven
Paul and Mi Jin found Song Min’s body in a makeshift morgue in the back room of a hospital. It lay covered with plastic in a wooden coffin. In traditional fashion, a ball of cloth had been stuffed in its mouth to prevent his soul from re-entering and animating his body. But this preparation, along with the appearance of the eyes—left open, looking surprised—was too gruesome for Paul to bear. He hurriedly pulled the lid of the coffin up and closed it. Only then did he look up and notice the rest of the room. Droves of weeping, shouting relatives filled it to overflowing. Seven other coffins lay in two neat rows. Most were covered with Korean flags. A few relatives had placed photographs of the dead—in school pictures or snapshots—on top of them.
Mi Jin went away for a few minutes while Paul prayed. When she came back she carried a votive candle and a large Korean flag. He spread the flag over the coffin and lit the candle on top.
"It’s too bad we don’t have a picture of him," Mi Jin said.
"Oh. I almost forgot." He searched through his wallet and finally produced the school picture Song Min had given him months ago in Mokpo, the one that came with the admonition never to forget him. He propped the portrait against the candle and prayed some more. Mi Jin held him and, when he finished, they talked about the boy’s life. They left an hour later. The sun was just going down.
Twelve
When Joel returned from the hospital later that evening, he found Leslie sitting in the gloom on a cushion on the floor, her knees pulled up under her chin, listening. At the sound of the door opening, she bounded up and fell into his arms. He stroked her hair for a long time until Paul and Mi Jin came home.
They spoke little, out of exhaustion and a reluctance to evoke the horrors they had seen that day. Eventually they fell asleep, all in the same room and fully clothed, and spent the night waking up at every sound, as animals do who fear predators.
A strained quiet ruled the night outside their rooms. The strictly enforced curfew had sent most people home or into hiding. But in the distance, to the north, where the universities were, the breeze occasionally brought whiffs of conflict, the whispers of chanting that faded in and out as the breeze changed direction. Everyone’s dreams reflected that sound, and also the sounds burned into memory during the day: the tear gas generators, the angry buzzing of the crowd, the clatter of boots on pavement.
Joel could sleep least of all. Sleep had come hard for him since childhood, when he avoided it as an unwelcome rehearsal for death. He went to the window, lit a cigarette, and strained to hear the fighting that still went on.
Thirteen
Paul, Mi Jin, and Leslie awoke the next morning to the hollow sound of a voice on Joel’s shortwave radio.
"The BBC says about forty people have been killed, and a hundred injured," Joel said. "We all know that’s short of the mark." He left it on that station until the announcer moved on to another story.
"I was listening to the local news a while ago. You might find this interesting." He switched to the AM band and tuned in one of the local stations.
"The city of Kwangju is quiet this morning after unprecedented attacks by hooligans against police over the past two days. Injuries from hurled rocks and bottles have caused dozens of injuries among riot control personnel. Thanks to their restraint in dealing with the demonstrations, police have reported no deaths on either side of the conflict and few injuries among the renegade students."
The announcer’s voice droned in the background while Mi Jin’s face went red with fury. "How can they say such a thing? How can they lie like that?" she sputtered.
They left immediately to go to the nearest radio station.
The maze of streets around their building was choked with thick black smoke. Paul counted a half-dozen cars on Kumnam Street, overturned and burning on the pavement. People milled about watching the fires. Paul and Mi Jin ran the next few blocks.
The crowds grew thicker as they went. Mi Jin heard snatches of talk as they moved through them: "They’ve taken my daughter away, and I don’t know where she is."—"My next door neighbour got bashed in the head by one of those goons; now he’s in a coma."—"Last night I saw a body being dragged behind a troop carrier, stripped naked and bleeding." Every angry word drew the people closer together in a fleeting camaraderie as they cursed the paratroopers and the government that had unleashed them, like dogs, upon its own people.
Paul stopped when the mob became too tightly packed for them to go farther. A column of black smoke rose from the windows and roof of the broadcasting station. The students near the edge of the fire danced for joy; they had apparently started it. "No more lies! No more lies!" they chanted.
"What happened to the people inside?" Mi Jin asked of no one in particular. A dark figure in the building, silhouetted against the flames, answered her question. It looked like a portly man in what used to be a business suit. The figure staggered among the blackened furniture and then tipped its head back in a howl of pain. It dropped to the floor and was lost.
"Hurrah!" the crowd shouted. "Hurrah! No more lies! No more lies!"
Mi Jin buried her face in her hands and fought to get away from the building. "Lord above!" she screamed when Paul caught up with her. "What are we doing? What are we doing?"
Paul hurried her away from the mob and headed up toward Kumnam Street; from there he meant to take her home. She held her hands over her mouth and choked, as if she were going to vomit. He turned the corner near the Provincial Office and looked up the street. His jaw dropped.
Kumnam Street stretched out before them in a roiling sea of humanity as far as the eye could see, even to the distant spot where the paratroopers had launched their first attack. Paul heard later that two hundred thousand people, a quarter of Kwangju’s population, including businessmen, housewives, workers, and the elderly, had gone out to demonstrate against the government. The roar of the protests was deafening. Mi Jin and others just entering the street stopped and stared, too, awed at their numbers. |
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