1985–86
Some forty-odd years after pretending to leave for a picnic, I returned home for the first time, in 1989. But before going into my North Korean visit, I should begin with my very first journey overseas, which took place a few years earlier, in 1985. That trip was what inspired me to go to the North.
We used to be able to sail to Manchuria or take a train to Siberia and even to Western Europe. That was during the Japanese occupation. But ever since the division of the Korean peninsula, those routes have been blocked. South Korea might as well be an island. We think of North Koreans as isolated, but even South Koreans weren’t allowed to travel as tourists until 1989, and it was difficult for us to get a permit to go abroad before then. There existed, however, a new, single-use “cultural passport” enabling artists and employees of large conglomerates to attend international events. The trickiest part of obtaining such a passport was the background checks—you were rejected if there was even a single thing off about your application. Once you did pass the background checks, you still had to attend national security training with intelligence officials and attach the certificate to your application. The United States was especially strict about granting visas. It took months to obtain one after submitting tax receipts, financial guarantees, invitations, and going through a grueling interview process at the American embassy. Still, getting a passport was in itself a great privilege.
I had the luck of applying when the process had been somewhat relaxed, just as Korea was beginning to open up. The background checks were still in place, and while a notoriously anti-government person like myself couldn’t normally dream of obtaining a visa, it so happened that I had published a controversial book of testimonials of the Gwangju Democracy Movement, titled The Kwangju Uprising—and, counterintuitively, this helped me obtain a passport to leave Korea for the first time.
Back in 1979, then-president Park Chung-hee had attempted to stay in office indefinitely only to be assassinated by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency director, Kim Jae-gyu, after which military officials seized power in a coup d’état and declared martial law. This triggered a groundswell of calls for democratization. In May of 1980, the military government massacred thousands of Gwangju citizens who were protesting against martial rule. Barricading themselves in the city’s provincial administration building, the residents of Gwangju had battled against the soldiers to protect their city.
Many people tried to tell the country and the world of the truth behind the slaughter at Gwangju. The whole of the Korean media was censored at the time under the government’s reporting guidelines. Only a few were able to learn what had happened, thanks to certain religious groups that had obtained news reports by foreign correspondents.
Having moved to Gwangju myself, I launched a cultural activist movement in the 1970s that included students, teachers, writers, and artists, and eventually expanded to bring in workers and farmers. Our first mission was to use as many tools of dissemination as possible to publicize the resistance movement in Gwangju. We could not afford modern staging and equipment, so we resorted to a traditional form of drama known as madanggeuk or “courtyard play,” which we performed outdoors in village plazas and empty lots, and created music to go along with it that we recorded on cassette tapes. Painters made posters, and young people with new skills used photography, 8 mm film, and video to create rough but affecting images. These activists went on to become famous directors, playwrights, writers, composers, singers, actors, painters, and filmmakers.
We decided something big had to be done to commemorate the upcoming fifth anniversary of the Gwangju Democracy Movement. Three teams in Gwangju collected news reports, photos, and videos created by Korean reporters, but, more importantly, recorded the testimonials of participants and witnesses.
Hong Hee-yun, my wife at the time and the mother of my two children, was in charge of the Songbaekhoe Gwangju women’s group, made up of activists, wives of political prisoners, teachers, and citizen group workers. They raised funds and provided support to the material collection team. My task was to summarize and streamline the collected records into a concise narrative. The young people gathering the testimonials discreetly forwarded the material to me via the Modern Cultural Research Center, to prevent the authorities from manufacturing a fake spy incident out of our efforts. The center had been established in 1979 by me and Yoon Han-Bong, who went into exile in the United States two years later, and was secretly still in operation after the Gwangju Uprising.
I came up to Seoul with the materials, rented a room near the publisher’s office, and worked on editing the book for a month. The initial pamphlets were distributed in universities, and a select few college activists staged a protest inside the American Center. It was an attempt to highlight the fact that our military rulers could not have been able to seize power without the tacit approval of the United States, which officially held operational command over the South Korean military. The book was published on schedule in May by a brave printer, and twenty thousand copies were distributed to bookstores. The publisher, Na Byung-sik of Pulbit Publishing, had been arrested twice before, during the National Democratic Youth and Student Alliance incident. This time he went into hiding for ten days before turning himself in. I was on the run for about a month, until his interrogation ended and the facts of the case were established.
The world seemed to do a somersault once the book was released. A police raid turned my house in Gwangju inside out, even digging up the flower garden. My clever wife had already stashed the Gwangju materials under the slate roof of an old shed in the corner of our yard. The police went through the shed, but they didn’t think to rip off the ceiling panels.
I went underground, moving from house to house of my younger writer friends on the outskirts of Seoul. The books were seized after about half of the first printing had been sold, but photocopiers were becoming mainstream and pirated copies entered the market. I called to turn myself in after a month and was taken to the police instead of central intelligence. The station was close enough to the Agency for National Security Planning (ANSP) Nam Mountain headquarters for intelligence investigators to come down and question me. They were trying to avoid a direct ANSP investigation, because the military dictatorship felt threatened by the rumors surrounding Gwangju. The lockup was full of students protesting against the government; they no doubt thought I would be a bad influence if I were in there with them, not to mention the number of famous and powerful people who came to the station demanding to see me. They quickly ended their interrogation and squirreled me away in a remote police station before putting me in the border customs detention center near the airport. The day I got there, a British woman in the next cell said hello. She had come in from Hong Kong. Someone had paid her to pass on something, a packet she had put into her bag without much thought, that turned out to be drugs. She wept with regret. Another cell held two people from the Middle East.
I was brought out of my cell for questioning a week later. The ANSP agent, a man of few words, said the government was treating my case as rumormongering, and even the highest sentence for this kind of misdemeanor was only twenty days in custody. My trial was set for two days later. He handed me two pieces of paper, which turned out to be invitations in German and English. Apparently, I’d received an invitation from West Germany, and the ANSP was getting heat for not letting me leave the country. But if I agreed to keep my mouth shut and leave Korea for a bit, the government would be willing to let me go. He visited me one more time. I wrote up my passport application in my cell, stamped my thumbprint, and even had my passport photo taken there. The day I was released, I received my passport and a plane ticket sent from Germany.
My wife Hong had come up from Gwangju to meet me. We spent a night in Seoul and bought clothes and a suitcase for my trip. She had to go back the very next day to relieve our neighbor, who was babysitting for us. We were exhausted. She and I had been housewife and novelist, but we’d also been working as political activists for years. We practically took turns being interrogated and investigated, miraculously avoiding arrest every time.
We had moved to Gwangju in 1976 at the beginning of our national movement for democracy. I was away from home several times a year, from a week up to a month. Hong kept herself busy by putting together a women’s group composed of the wives of our imprisoned younger friends. They did things like knit socks and gloves for the prisoners and take up collections for their prison allowances.
When I was home, I was so taken up with the novel I was serializing that we never once went out for dinner. My habit of working at night and sleeping during the day also made it difficult for us to have more than one meal at a time together. It was my fault. Even when we did sit down face-to-face, an uncomfortable silence settled between us as we ate. It wasn’t long before we both stopped bothering to do anything about it. That day, after my release, I should have escorted her to the bus terminal in Gangnam, but I took her to a restaurant instead and reluctantly told her over dinner, “I’m sorry, I’ll try to write often.”
Aside from my general hopelessness with the paperwork involved, we had no telephone at home. Getting a landline installed in any house outside of Seoul was complicated. My colleagues used to joke, “What’s the point of having a phone? The police will just tap it anyway.”
Hong must have felt some premonition at that moment, because her eyes suddenly grew red and she quickly turned away to wipe her tears.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, surprised. “Are you worried for me?”
Her usual calm and cool demeanor returned. “I think you’ll be away for longer than you think. But have a good trip. And don’t drink too much.”
She left in a taxi while I stood there on the pavement staring after her. I had no idea that that was the beginning of the end for us. Even now, when I think back on that moment, my heart is seized with sorrow and I feel swept away by a wave of regret.
*
West Berlin in 1985 was like a desert island in the middle of East Germany. In essence, it was a city under occupation by the forces that had won World War II. No one could imagine that the wall looming over Berlin’s gloomy, peaceful cityscape would fall in a few years. Whenever I visited Berlin afterward, I would always find it odd that there was still no direct flight between Seoul and the German capital, and remember the gray walls towering above.
I was a country bumpkin on his first overseas trip, and as the Europeans I met kept asking “Who are you?” I naturally began asking myself the same question. Who was I? I was forty-two. I had written four novellas and a volume of plays and had just published the tenth volume of my popular novel Jang Gil-san, which I had been serializing since 1974. My work, however, did not exist outside of Korea. I promised myself on the plane that I wouldn’t even bother mentioning literature: I would only talk to as many people as possible about the plight of the citizens of Gwangju and our democracy movement.
When I arrived, I was met by Korean students living in Berlin who were charged by the event planners with taking me around. These students were sponsored by the Korean Germans who had come over as coal miners and nurses in the 1960s. Some of the students had been miners and nurses themselves and had remained in Germany for school or other jobs when their contracts ran out. Some of them married Germans or became local doctors, teachers, technicians, or businesspeople. They learned about trade unions, human rights activism, and social engagement through German activists on the ground, and became aware of Gwangju and the Korean democracy movement through the Korean students studying abroad. They were well organized and, in some ways, more radical than the students who had to go back to Korea after their studies. And they were, from the perspective of the Korean embassy representing the military dictatorship, troublemakers all.
The novelist Yun Heung-gil and the cultural activist Im Jin-taek were already at the hotel when I arrived. Berlin was staging a cultural event called “Horizonte,” to highlight little-known emerging nations. According to their brochure, the event before ours had dealt with Latin America, and the one before that, Africa. Asia was in focus for Horizonte ’85. I remember that the program included the Jindo sitgimgut shamanic ritual, classical and folk music, and art exhibits, as well as the three of us.
Our event featured Im Jin-taek and Germany’s Wolf Biermann in the first act, and readings by Yun Heung-gil and me, followed by a Q and A, in the second. Im Jin-taek was a first-generation cultural activist along with Kim Chi-ha and me. For the event, Im Jin-taek repurposed Kim Chi-ha’s ballad “The story of sound” into modern pansori. The original poem was a famous satire that directly criticized the Park Chung-hee government and had led to a death sentence for Kim Chi-ha. The incident had the opposite effect to that intended by the South Korean dictatorship, inspiring instead an international campaign of writers and intellectuals to save him. Kim Chi-ha was finally released, but his poetry remained banned and he continued to be hospitalized from the aftereffects of torture.
Wolf Biermann was born to communist activist parents, and his Jewish father had been incarcerated for years by the Nazis before being executed at Auschwitz. He became disenchanted with the failure of East Germany to achieve the real ideals of communism and wrote about these thoughts in songs and poems, which branded him as “unfriendly” in the eyes of the East German authorities. His first collection of poetry, The Wire Harp, was regarded as anti-national, and Biermann was censored and put under house arrest for eleven years. Then he won the West German Offenbach Prize in 1974. When he performed in Cologne by invitation of a metalworkers’ trade union in 1976, East Germany deprived him of his citizenship and banned him from the country. This sparked criticism against the East German government, and twelve writers signed a petition condemning the decision. I happened to meet three of those twelve: Sarah Kirsch, who had left East Germany for good, in Hamburg; Christa Wolf, whom I met the very winter the Berlin Wall came down, during my German exile days after my visit to North Korea; and Stefan Heym, at a literary event for the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway’s Tromsø. Biermann’s ban was a shock to East Germany, the effects of which lasted for a long time. Some even considered it the trigger for the fall of the Wall.
The only East German work I had read at the time was Uwe Johnson’s Speculations about Jakob, which had been published in Korea. Christa Wolf’s Divided Heaven, published in East Germany in 1963, only appeared in South Korea in 1989. Their works made me think that South Korea was more similar to East Germany than West Germany. Much like Gwangju, the June 1953 workers’ uprising had been cruelly suppressed by Soviet tanks. And echoing South Korea’s restrictions on foreign travel, East Germany built a wall around itself and maintained tight control over its citizens while keeping them under constant Stasi surveillance. I kept remembering the strangely familiar mood in Brecht’s poetry collection Buckow Elegies.
If the South Korean military dictatorship seemed East German, the North Korean system was even more extreme than East Germany’s. It’s been said many times before, but North Korea’s constant state of emergency—justified by the decades-old isolation promoted by the Americans—has enabled the endurance of its political system of control and tension. I know very well that North Korean society could never produce work that criticizes the government as East Germany’s could. But my thinking was that, as long as South Korea was unable to establish a democratic society like West Germany’s, we could hardly afford to criticize North Korea or even hope to change it. My experience of visiting a Germany that was divided like Korea, and then spending several years in a Germany where the Wall fell during my exile there in 1989, would inform my worldview forever after.
After the Horizonte event, a man who had come to Germany as a miner and ended up getting his Ph.D. there told me there was something I needed to see. He drove me to the composer Yun I-sang’s house outside Berlin. On the street in front of his house, the city had posted a sign that read “Artist at work, please do not honk,” which left me feeling very impressed with the German authorities. I would later spend the first months of my exile in this house.
“I am not a communist.” This was the first thing Yun I-sang said to me after shaking my hand.
I was taken aback. “You don’t have to worry about that with me,” I replied.
After he was arrested in 1967, someone had written about him saying how he couldn’t possibly be a communist because his music was too modern. The Soviets and the Eastern Bloc had believed any modernist music or experimental art to be reactionary.
Yun I-sang had quit his job as a music teacher at the age of forty to study in France, and later moved to Germany. His wife, Lee Suja, had lived apart from him for five years before joining him in Germany, while their two children grew up in a relative’s home and did not get to see their father for close to ten years.
In the 1960s, the North Korean embassy in East Germany regularly sent pamphlets and propaganda to South Korean students studying in Europe. These proved fascinating to the young intellectuals who had spent their lives in the echo chamber of the South Korean dictatorship. Yun I-sang visited the North Korean embassy, which happened to be a few subway stops away. Around this time, the painter Yi Eungro, in an incident that broke the hearts of his family and friends, had been lured from Paris to North Korea with a promise that he would be allowed to meet his son who had gone North during the Korean War. Yun I-sang was considered one of the world’s five best contemporary music composers in the West, and Yi Eungro had been famous for combining Korean ink-brush paintings with Western methods and was popular on the biennale circuit.
There had been others in the so-called “East Berlin Spy Incident,” some of whom were implicated for merely visiting the North Korean embassy out of curiosity; others actually took up the North Koreans’ offer to host them in the country. The territory remains inaccessible under the National Security Act, and the Cold War did not make things easier at the time. In contrast, West Germany cultivated a policy of engagement that encouraged its citizens to contact and interact with East Germans. If anything, it was the East Germans who were wary of contact, but they were authorizing four-day passes for those who had family living in the West—a far cry from South Korea’s policy of total separation. They even allowed single-day visas for foreign visitors.
Yun I-sang was not really a political person to begin with. He became a pro-democracy advocate after his run-in with the South Korean government made him realize the extent of our plight. He has always said that his visit to North Korea was for two reasons. One was that he wanted to catch up with his friend, the leftist composer Kim Sun-nam, from whom he had been separated since the war. Kim went North just before the Korean War broke out and later studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where his work was lauded by Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian, famous for composing the ballet Spartacus. Khachaturian in particular urged Kim to request asylum in the USSR at the time of the state purge of the Workers’ Party of South Korea, but he refused and returned to North Korea, where he was stripped of his privileges and died of an illness soon after. Yun I-sang, who was the same age as Kim, never forgot Kim’s talent and legendary social engagement following Korea’s Liberation in 1945 from Japanese occupation, which was why he wanted to see his friend one last time. Of course, once Yun I-sang arrived in Pyongyang, not only could he not see his friend, but he discovered it was forbidden to even mention Kim’s name in public.
The other reason he went to North Korea was that he wanted to see the ancient Goguryeo murals with his own eyes; a Japanese publisher had just brought out a book of vivid color pictures of these tomb paintings. Yun I-sang understood modern Western music as a deconstruction of the past and a recombination with Eastern influences. He attempted to expand Western music by introducing into it the rhythms, improvisational character, and five-tone scale of Korean folk, classical, and court music. The photographs of the Goguryeo murals had instantly inspired new musical forms in his mind. The blue dragon, white tiger, red phoenix, and black tortoise were turned into variations on a theme, the music capturing the dance and flight of these fantastical animals.
I completely understood what this old artist meant when he said he had only wanted to meet his friend and see the wondrous murals. Unlike now, when South Koreans are allowed to freely travel the world, anyone stepping out of the de facto island that was our peninsula back then experienced something akin to a panic attack, brought on not by homesickness but rather the overwhelming sense of freedom that we encountered on foreign soil. And yet this freedom has the effect of isolating the traveler from their normal space and time. In an intellectual, moreover, it triggers a feeling of humiliation and defeat. In your attempt to escape the consciousness of the peninsula, you suddenly begin to think you are no different from the Europeans around you. You forget, strangely enough, the virulently anti-communist country you came from. That is how a perfectly sane and worldly intellectual can take one look at a piece of North Korean propaganda and cross the border, heart aflutter, despite the threat of prison or execution back home. Those who had family in Japan or happened to have a relative who was forced into labor during the war, or those who crossed the sea border by mistake while fishing and spent time trapped in North Korea before being returned, or those who drunkenly mouthed off about politics at a bar, their tongues loosened by makgeolli, an everyman’s rice brew—all kinds of people have served time and later successfully sued the government for imprisoning them under fabricated charges. I consider myself fortunate, but nothing can compensate me or my family for the years we lost in suffering.
The East Berlin Spy Incident came about when a South Korean youth studying in Germany visited North Korea and then turned himself in when he came back to Seoul. South Korean operatives dressed it up as an organized espionage effort. They carried out a secret investigation and concocted a list of people, some of whom they lured to one location only to haul them off to the South Korean embassy and others whom they called on in person to invite them to a fake Liberation event being held in the home country, going so far as to accompany them on the plane ride back to Seoul, where they were promptly arrested. Many people’s lives were destroyed in this way like so much tissue paper—just the few stories here are tragic enough. This is the net we have woven under the North–South division, a net that traps us to this day.
Yun I-sang said to me before we parted, “Thank you for coming to see me. I’m aware that even calling me on the phone is grounds for interrogation when you get back to Korea.”
“I couldn’t leave Berlin without seeing you. I would have been too ashamed to face my friends back home.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he replied in a low voice, “but I do intend to help North Korea . . . as people of the same blood. They need to open their doors and step out into the world.”
I thought I would never see him again, but Yun I-sang called me the next day, asking to meet for lunch. He was seated with an old German couple when I got there. The woman was the novelist Luise Rinser, who would have been in her mid-seventies at the time. Her eyes sparkled with mischievous curiosity and her firm lips and high cheekbones gave her an air of formidable will and perhaps stubbornness. I knew her, of course, from reading contemporary German literature. Her novel Nina. Mitte des Lebens, published in 1950, had been translated into Korean by Jeon Hye-lin, who worked as a translator and essayist after returning to Korea from her studies in Munich, but committed suicide just as she turned thirty. Many young, bookish women who read this translation ended up applying to German literature departments for college. But Rinser’s life was not as glamorous as they may have thought. Her first husband, an orchestra conductor, died on the Russian front, and she herself had been incarcerated while resisting the Nazis. Her third husband was the contemporary composer Carl Orff, but they had divorced. Orff and Yun I-sang were friends, and Rinser even published a book of her conversations with Yun I-sang, titled The Wounded Dragon.
Rinser visited Korea for the first time in 1975. Her impressions of that trip, compared to her account of her North Korean visit in 1980, were extremely negative. Korean conservatives still call her a communist and a puppet of Kim Il-sung’s regime, but she really wasn’t a communist. If anything, she was an extreme environmentalist who once ran as the presidential candidate for the German Greens. Her Nordkoreanisches Reisetagebuch (North Korean Travel Diary) remains a controversial work in South Korea to this day.
Rinser visited Korea after Park Chung-hee had abolished term limits for his presidency in 1972 and declared a state of emergency in 1974, arresting students and activists left and right for protesting these measures. Universities were closed indefinitely. Arriving in the midst of such trouble, it’s obvious that Rinser would not have derived a good impression. She managed to elude the agents trailing her, and met with many activists and conscientious intellectuals. She also seems to have explored the red-light districts that operated openly in the back alleys of central Seoul and the bars where women wore traditional hanbok, places she referred to as “geisha houses.”
Rinser visited North Korea in 1980 when South Korea was in the throes of a terrible, tragic time. The mere mention of “Gwangju” inspired anger among the world’s media and artists. Of course, we now detect all sorts of prejudice in her travel writing about North Korea, which tries to treat the socialist idealism of the dictatorship objectively, making it somewhat different in tone from, say, André Gide’s conclusions in Return from the USSR. I will say more about this later. But, whenever someone asked me what it was like visiting North Korea, I always said, “I was moved, and I despaired.” Then I would add, “I was moved by the resilience of the North Korean people, who created a self-sustaining way of life out of the ashes of war, and I despaired over the viselike control of the North Korean government.”
Rinser asked me if I was going to return to Korea, and, as I had no other plans, I said yes. She suggested I apply for asylum instead. I was adamant in my refusal. “I have to go back to where they speak my mother tongue.”
It was not until much later that I realized how naive and preposterous those words were. She was silent for a moment after Yun I-sang interpreted for me, and then said in a cheerful voice, “Well, if you want to spend some time overseas, you ought to learn some German or English first.”
I met her again on the summit of Paektu Mountain during the First Pan-Korean National Conference in 1990. Even then I would never have dreamed that the world was about to grow worse. But a crueler age was headed toward us, an age of widespread and indiscriminate bloodshed brought on by ideological and religious conflicts, by imperialist desires disguised as civil wars.
