Ko Un - Maninbo - Peace & War

shabbier than a shadow.

In Pagoda Park stands the stone pagoda of Wongak Temple

which looks sometimes like an ice sculpture.

It was noisy around that ice sculpture

after the second recapture of Seoul:

a home for the homeless,

a workplace for those with no work.

From mid-morning on

people would gather one by one around the pagoda.

After five in the afternoon

they left one by one.

There was a man

who made a fervent speech there,

holding an old fan,

when about one hundred

or perhaps only twenty had gathered.

He talked about Dangun, our country’s founder,

General Im Gyeong-eop,

Kim Jong-seo and

and Han Myeong-hui, politicians in days of old, too.

He looked haggard.

His eyes were not clear and he had wrinkles like a mud-flat.

He said,

‘A hundred years from now,

our country will be the centre of the world.

Fifty years from now,

our country will be the top nation of the East.

In future our nation

will receive tribute from 300 countries.’

Kim Dong-bok

never missed a day.

After making a passionate speech for about two hours,

if someone bought him a bowl of noodles

he would gulp down all the broth in a moment,

and then say,

‘In future, Korea

will be the presiding country of

the World Presidents’ Association.

Wait and see.

Wait and see.

Ah, those noodles were tasteless.’

He misspoke. He meant to say ‘tasty’.

He looked around

old panama hats,

felt hats,

helmets,

straw hats,

military caps,

and

bare heads, crew-cuts.

Korea was a battlefield, everywhere.

The battlefront

moved south down the peninsula.

Then the battlefront

shifted north up the peninsula.

The battlefront

left not one place untouched,

rummaged everywhere,

trashed every corner.

Moreover, the battle was not only on the front.

In the rear

between one and another,

there was hatred

deceit,

plunder.

Before, under Japanese rule, foolish people were friends together.

But here on this battlefield

even foolish people turned into one another’s enemies.

Yeom Gi-uk informed on Baek U-jong,

saying that he met the younger brother of Kim Chin-gu

who’d gone north after Liberation.

But Kim Chin-gu had already died in the Bodoyeonmaeng*

and his younger brother had gone north, so he’d never met him.

Yeom was Baek’s middle-school classmate

but Baek once refused a request Yeom made

so Baek U-jong was denounced.

False or not

if you denounced someone as a spy, you got a reward.

All the guys you disliked were spies.

* After Liberation in 1945 and before the Korean War the South government tried to convert communist sympathisers; the organisation composed of such people was called the Bodoyeonmaeng (the Bodo League) and most of them were killed by the police of the Southern government when the South Korean forces were retreating for the second time on January 4, 1951; that was when Koreans began killing each other indiscriminately.

His comrades were arrested.

He slipped away to Tianjin, in China,

to a Chinese slum –

the independence fighter Kim Gyu-sik,

together with his wife Kim Sun-ae,

and their son Kim Jin-se.

Neither father

nor mother

taught Korean to their son, born in 1928.

It would mean the end, if ever

a Korean word popped out

while he was playing with Chinese kids.

Agents of the Japanese army

had ears even in the Chinese slums.

Kim Jin-se only learned Korean after he turned thirty.

He learned some very clumsy Korean

from his countrymen in the Korean Provisional Government

in Shanghai,

in Chongqing.

He spoke Chinese far better.

You had to leave in order to live.

A division of the Japanese army in northern Korea crossed the Tumen River

on an operation designed to annihilate the Koreans

to the north of the Tumen River

and north of the Yalu.

In revenge for the great defeat at Cheongsan-ri

the Japanese planned an operation with three slogans:

Kill on sight!

Burn on sight!

Rob on sight!

The Koreans in western Manchuria

fled northward,

northward,

to the end of maize fields, millet fields,

northward to the end of the sky.

Following the Songhua River for a hundred ri

beyond Harbin,

they fled to the far end of the open plains of North Manchuria,

and there, at the far end of those open plains,

there,

they unloaded,

made dugout shelters, settled down.

Seokju’s first words:

The waters of this Songhua River flow all the way

from Korea’s Paektu Mountain…

They decided to make it the second base for the Independence Movement

and mulled over ways to live.

Brothers were warm-hearted toward each other

in their life of exile.

Yi Sang-ryong

and his younger brother

Yi Bong-hui

shared warm affection and

strong convictions.

There, in Chwiwonjang,

the birch-wood fire in the kitchen

never went out

throughout several bitter winter months.

Japan surrendered at midday on 15 August 1945.

Called an unconditional surrender,

it was conditional,

for the emperor stayed in place.

From that day

paper Taegeukgis fluttered across the Korean peninsula.

They fluttered there, sometimes just with a yin-yang symbol

and the four divination signs added

to the red circle of a Japanese flag.

On 20 August 1945,

a declaration was issued by the Soviet Army:

We, the Red Army, grant all the conditions

needed for the Korean people

to begin to live with freedom and creativity.

The Korean people themselves

should create their own happiness.

On 2 September 1945

General Order No. 1 was issued from the headquarters of America’s MacArthur:

All Korean people must immediately obey all orders

issued under my authority.

All acts of resistance to the occupying forces

and disturbances of public peace

will be severely punished.

Taegeukgis that had been hidden since March 1919 were fluttering everywhere.

Taegeukgis that had been buried until August 1945 were fluttering again.

However, the Americans were not a liberation army

but an occupying army.

Paper Taegeukgis were fluttering for them.

Chin Mu-gil of Yongdun village, Miryong-ri, Mi-myeon, Okku-gun, North Jeolla

was good at painting Taegeukgis on paper.

He drew fifty a day.

He even took some over the hill to Okjeong-ri.

He sent some to Mijei village, too.

On 6 October 1945

an American jeep appeared in Yongdun village.

The villagers welcomed the big-nosed soldiers

carrying Taegeukgis in their hands.

Who knew that the soldiers would start hunting women?

All the village’s pigtailed young women

hid in fireholes,

crept under the floors,

hid in bamboo groves,

but they were dragged from their hiding places

up the hill behind the village.

In Hamgyeong province in northern Korea, too,

it’s said that Soviet troops robbed people of their watches

and hunted for women.