from A Tall, Blue Ladder

Gong Ji Young

Illustration by Shuxian Lee

13

“War gives everyone a license to kill, Johan.”

Grandma stared at me again. I always thought that I was lucky because I was a grandchild who could communicate intelligently with a grandmother who was over seventy. And I also understood why she had never shared this with my father, a father who firmly believed that God is an anti-communist.

“War is the victory of those who want to reverse human evolution and go back to being animals again.”

Grandma shuddered briefly.

“Things like the number of deaths are meaningless. Seen on a large scale, they would almost all have died in any case. That is not the problem. The problem is that war tempts us. As with all intense evil, war robs us of all tenderness, warmth, and goodness. When staying alive goes ahead of everything else, humans quickly turn into animals and this world quickly turns into Hell. I can assure you that I saw Hell there. Even if we die and God sends us to Hell, people who have experienced war would not be surprised. Do you understand? How to explain?

“When I opened the door one morning, my neighbor, who had greeted me the previous day, was lying in the road in front of the house with his guts hanging out, frozen and naked. Someone had already gone off with his clothes. No one cares if someone drags off a neighbor they already hated in peacetime and kills him by night, or if someone carries off a girl from the next village, whom they’d already had an eye on before, rapes and strangles her. Weak humans are obliged to kneel unconditionally before those who are stronger than themselves.

“To make matters worse, intensely cold weather was coming and there was nothing to eat. Then shells came pouring down. Rumors that Chinese troops were coming swept across the town. We were terrified of the Chinese Communist forces. After suffering for long years under the Soviet army and having previously suffered for such a long time under the Japanese, we had finally welcomed the North Korean troops, who we could at least call compatriots, but now after the Americans it was the turn of the Chinese.

“When I woke up one morning, an endless procession of refugees was headed southward. The sound of bombs falling, which had been in the distance, began to come closer. Holding my swollen belly, the baby being near full term, I walked with your grandfather. And so we arrived in Heungnam. It was twenty degrees below zero. Along the road we would sleep in people’s barns. Then, the vast sea spread before us. All the ships floating there were American. We were told that there was an order that none but soldiers could get on the boats.”

Grandma downed another glass of plum wine.

 

14

“The bodies of babies were floating in the icy sea. Ready to do anything to reach the South, people went wading into the freezing sea and there they lost hold of the babies they were carrying on their backs or in their arms. By now the sound of wailing was nothing new.

“Then people started crowding onto a ship just in front of us. It was really nothing more than a small boat—so small that it was very doubtful it would be able to make its way through the high waves and reach the South. I rushed to get on the boat, but I couldn’t. The boat started off before our eyes, but so many people had boarded it that it looked like it was about to sink. Your grandfather, young as he was then, dissuaded me. That ship, floating right in front of us, seemed really to be on the point of sinking. We on the dockside were watching.

“‘Throw all your luggage overboard! The boat is sinking!’

“When someone shouted that, the people began to throw away all the bundles they were carrying, bedding, even food. Yet still, the ship seemed in danger of sinking. It could go no further. But they probably had nothing left to throw overboard. And then I saw the most terrible scene in the world.

“One woman was carrying a child on her back, and was holding another by the hand. We could see that she was being forced backward until she was hanging halfway over the side of the ship. From the dockside we could see people’s faces. I heard someone yelling. There were members of our church on board. All were good people who had their own troubles in North Korea. I had seen them praying and singing hymns just before they got on the ship. But now they were shouting:

“‘Commie! Red scum! Get off this ship, right now!’

“Even from a distance, I could see the fear in the woman’s eyes. Even as people were thinking: ‘Oh, that woman!’ driven by people’s eyes and cries, she threw herself into the icy sea, with her baby still on her back, and the six-year-old child beside her . . . No one did anything to save them. The woman’s despairing face rose above the waves a few times then disappeared. The two children, too . . .

“I can assure you that I have seen that scene, showing what war is about, at least a hundred times since then, Johan.”



15

“He was appalled at what we had just seen. I was the same. We were seized by the fear that it would only take one person pointing at him and saying, “Aren’t you a Communist?” and that would be the end of us, publicly, barbarously, with no one to intervene. The airstrikes were in the sky, the bombing was behind our backs, the open sea lay before our eyes, and even the refugees at our side, who I had believed were sharing the same plight, with a single pointed finger might at any time turn into executioners who would take his life and mine, and the life of the child in my womb. Moreover, civilians were now ordered not to approach the quayside anymore. There was not an inch of room left. If you once let go of someone’s hand, there was no hope of ever finding them again. Children crying after losing their parents, the shouts and tears of people separated from their husbands and children . . . .

Suddenly a ship appeared before us. It wasn’t just a ship, but a ship so huge that I had the impression that the top deck was touching the sky. People began to surge in that direction. At that moment I saw a kind of rope ladder suddenly come dropping from the high railing of the ship, that went soaring into the sky. People started climbing up the ladder onto the ship. Ah, it was even more wonderful than the text in the Bible where Jacob sees a passageway leading up to heaven, a ladder with angels ascending and descending on it.”

What kind of synesthesia was this? At that moment, I heard the monastery bell ringing in my ear. Was the image of a ladder coming down from heaven inscribed at that instant in the genes of my father as he lay in Grandmother’s womb, then passed down in his blood to me?

Grandma was not looking at me. She was paying no attention to me. There she was, already over seventy, downing her third glass of plum wine in the middle of a summer’s day.

“We went running in that direction. As I climbed the ladder and looked up, I could see a Westerner, an American, standing on the deck, and hanging from his fingers I glimpsed a rosary. At that moment I felt sure I was saved. I believed God had sent the ship from Heaven.”

Grandma’s voice was trembling. My grandmother who called herself a crustacean. I had always seen her hard outer shell. She believed that with that she wouldn’t be hurt, or she thought she could cope with it. Yet she had said that once something pierces the hard shell and makes a wound, there is no way to get free of it. The crustacean is doomed to suffer forever after.

translated from the Korean by An Seon Jae



Click here to read an excerpt of Gong Ji Young’s A Good Woman, translated by Lizzie Buehler, from our Spring 2018 issue.

Read the original in Korean

Listen to the original read by July Ban:

A Tall, Blue Ladder was first published in Korea in 2013. It begins (mainly in flashback) with the story of the brief romantic relationship between a young Korean Benedictine novice monk and the niece of his Abbot, who has grown up in the United States, where she already has an American fiancé. Finally, she returns to the United States and the monk remains in his monastery. When he is tormented by the loss of the woman he loved, his grandmother tells him of her escape from North Korea during the Heungnam Evacuation, a true story when fourteen thousand refugees were transported on one ship, the SS Meredith Victory, thanks to the decision of its captain Leonard LaRue. In this novel, the monk’s father was one of the children born during the five-day journey to South Korea but his grandmother recounts (just after this extract) how her beloved husband stayed on the quay helping the refugees board the ship and was left behind when it sailed. So he surely died just after. He had been the love of her life, although he was a Communist and she a Catholic when they met. By the time they were parted he had given up the Party and was preparing to be baptized so that they could be married and raise together the baby she was already expecting. But it was not to be.

The novel explores the Heungnam Evacuation in particular depth, for near the end the monk in question, many years later, visits St. Paul's Abbey in Newton, New Jersey, and meets Brother Marinus, the former Captain of the Meredith Victory, who tells the story of the evacuation as he lived it, only hours before he dies.

Another true story given intense value in the novel involves the dreadful Oksadok prison camp in North Korea, where a group of German Benedictine monks and sisters were imprisoned until many months after the end of the Korean War. One elderly monk tells of his experiences of pain and loss during the years he spent there. As a translator, I found this a particularly powerful strand in the novel. In the 1980s, I met several of the German monks who had survived that same camp, for all returned to South Korea when released and finally died there, in the Benedictine monastery at Waegwan, which is the main setting for the novel.

The main theme of the novel can be considered to be the difficulty, indeed the near impossibility, of a lasting, harmonious, and fruitful romantic relationship between a man and a woman, even when both believe that they are in love. This is a major theme in many of Gong’s novels as it is also in her private life. Her most recent novel, The Open Sea, describes a meeting between a woman and a man (a former seminarian) after a separation of forty years, there having been some kind of romantic attraction when they were both in their late teens. Here, uncertain and lost memories contribute to the tension, as they now struggle to understand each other in a way that they had failed to do previously. 

This extract begins as the monk’s grandmother recalls her experience of living in North Korea at the start of the Korean War, after the North Korean forces had retreated northward and as the Chinese “volunteers” were beginning to cross into North Korea to support the North.

Gong Ji Young (공지영) is one of Korea’s best-known novelists, her novels having sold over 10 million copies in Korea. Her books have won several major literary awards. Her first major novel, 무소의 뿔처럼 혼자서 가라 (Go Alone Like a Rhino Horn; 해냄) was published in 1993. In all, she has published more than a dozen novels, four collections of short stories, as well as a number of collections of essays and pieces in other genres. Several of her published titles are clearly linked to her Catholic faith. Three of her novels, 우리들의 행복한 시간; 해냄 (2005) (Our Happy Time, trans. Sora Kim-Russell; Short Books, 2014); 봉순이 언니; 해냄 (1998) (My Sister Bongsoon, trans. Park Jung-eun; Mosaic Press, 2010); and 인간에 대한 예의;. 창비 (2006) (Human Decency, trans. Bruce Fulton & Ju-Chan Fulton; Jimoondan, 2006), have been published in English. An Seon Jae (안선재, Brother Anthony) has translated 높고 푸른 사다리 (A Tall, Blue Ladder; 해냄, 2013) and her most recent novel, 먼 바다 (The Open Sea; 해냄, 2020) but neither has as yet found a publisher.

An Seon Jae (Brother Anthony of Taizé) was born in England in 1942. He has lived in Korea since 1980 and was for many years a professor of English literature at Sogang University (Seoul) where he is now an emeritus professor, as well as being a chair-professor at Dankook University. Since 1990, he has had translations of several novels published and some fifty volumes of modern Korean poetry, including multiple volumes by Ko Un and Ku Sang, as well as several volumes by Kim Seung-Hee, Jeong Ho-seung, and Do Jong-hwan; this year, he hopes to see the publication of translations of poetry collections by Sin Yong-mok, Park Nohae, and Song Kyung-dong. In the last few years, he has been translating popular novels using his Korean name An Seon Jae (he took Korean nationality in 1994), and several of these should be published later this year. He has received a number of awards, including an MBE from Queen Elizabeth, and served for ten years as the President of the Royal Asiatic Society (Korea).