Black Flower (34 page)

“I will raise the child well. If something should happen with General Obregón, and something happens to me, please take care of my wife and the child. And take care of yourself. No matter what we might do, this is a revolution of a nation not our own. Whichever way it may go, it is best to leave it up to them.”

Ijeong went outside. The sky was still bright but the sun could not be seen. Bak Jeonghun kept a gentle watch by the barbershop entrance, like a hunting dog pretending to look the other way. His eyes were smiling but his posture was full of tension. Ijeong turned his steps toward the piers. From afar he could see Yeonsu returning from the market. Bak Jeonghun, his face expressionless, greeted her and led her into the barbershop. Ijeong returned to Mérida. The bell of Celaya was once again ringing in his ears.

T
HE STORIES CONCERNING
what happened later in Guatemala vary widely, especially those about the nation that was founded there. Most of the men died in the jungle, but even those who came back alive did not fully understand the origins of that strange nation. There are many cases where a nation’s beginnings are shrouded in mist compared to its decline. The following is the leading version of what occurred during those few years in Tikal.

One day, a man led a crowd to the Mérida branch office of the Korean National Association. He was a Mayan, and he said that his name was Mario. His features were unusual. His eyes were sharp and fierce, but his expression was gentle. Mario told Jo Jangyun and Kim Seokcheol an interesting story.

The southern part of the Yucatán Peninsula belonged to Guatemala, and its border faced the Mexican state of Campeche. If you crossed the border and entered Guatemala, you would find a vast jungle there. The Mayan civilization had blossomed long ago in this primitive forest, but now it was nothing more than a tropical rain forest. Before the imperialists had drawn lines on the map, the Mayans had built small nations across the entire peninsula, and these nations repeatedly rose and fell. Some thought that the physical characteristics of the Yucatán made the emergence of a centralized nation impossible. This was because there was abundant water and produce throughout the region, and no great rivers flowed like in China, so there was no pressing need for the emergence of a unified state.

Mario said that his people were fighting against the forces of President Manuel Estrada Cabrera in the southern Yucatán, in the northern jungles of Guatemala. A dictator who had come to power in 1898, President Cabrera was so brutal that Porfirio Díaz could not begin to compare with him in atrocities. Díaz had at least contributed to the modernization of Mexico, but Cabrera did such preposterous things as designate his birthday and his mother’s birthday as national holidays while he drove the whole of Guatemala into a quagmire of abject poverty, all for the sake of large American agricultural companies. He was without a doubt the common enemy of the Guatemalan people. Not only that, but Cabrera’s Guatemala, unlike mestizo-centered Mexico, relied on a ruling system centered around whites. This meant cruel treatment of mixed bloods and Mayans. The Mayans, who made up a solid majority of the population, were faced with the severe oppression and discrimination of the Cabrera regime, and this naturally led to an uprising of Mayans around the nation.

In particular, the area of Tikal in northern Guatemala was farthest from the capital, Guatemala City, and devoid of a transportation network that would allow access by road, by water, or by air, and so was ideal for executing a guerrilla war. The problem, however, was force of arms.

“I have heard that there are many former soldiers among the Koreans of the Yucatán. We need able-bodied men who have abundant combat experience and can handle weapons,” Mario said to the group of men around him. “In return, we will pay you three million American dollars. Cabrera has stashed away vast sums of cash, so if the revolution succeeds, a large amount of money will fall into the hands of the revolutionaries. Right now people are outraged at Cabrera’s rule and public opinion has turned against him. He will definitely not last long.”

Their mouths dropped open at the huge sum. Three million dollars. Not three million pesos, but three million dollars. That was enough for everyone who participated in the war to turn their lives around and still have some left over. They could contribute not only to the operating funds of the Sungmu School and the Korean School, but also to the overseas independence movement. Considering that the total amount used in planning the group move to Hawaii was five thousand dollars, three million was an almost incomprehensible sum to them. Jo Jangyun asked if they could first send a few dozen men and then later recruit and dispatch more. Mario said that would be fine.

Jo Jangyun called an emergency meeting of the Mérida branch. All of the young Koreans who had lost their jobs when the henequen haciendas went up in smoke were interested. The flame of revolution had already swept through the Yucatán as well, so the young people were fascinated by unlimited violence, and the rumors of Ijeong, who had served as a member of Villa’s army, also stimulated them. Stories of Ijeong swelled far beyond reality; he was becoming something of a legend among the Koreans. But Ijeong had lived a rather calm and quiet life since his return, and Mario’s words had not changed that. He was not particularly interested in Guatemala. Jo Jangyun tried to persuade him.

“You must go. You have abundant combat experience and speak Spanish well.”

“I don’t want to go this time. After all, this is someone else’s revolution, is it not?”

“Yes, that’s true. But with three million dollars, we can use that money not only for our own finances but also as capital for the overseas independence movement, so you can’t just think of it as someone else’s problem.”

“I’m sorry, but I have no interest in that either.”

Ijeong stubbornly rejected Jo Jangyun’s and Kim Seokcheol’s overtures. Finally, Jo Jangyun erupted in anger. “How can you live your life thinking only of yourself! Are you planning on idling your time away and eating up the association’s food?”

He was like a father to him; he had given him his name. And eventually Ijeong gave in. He no longer wished to involve himself in the revolutionary wars of other countries, but he had no choice. He had no way of making a living right then. He went to Mérida and gathered information on the situation in Guatemala. Guatemala was practically in a state of anarchy. Both Mexico and the United States wondered when Cabrera’s regime, with no authority and no validity, would fall. Only the sum of three million dollars was in doubt.

Yet the Mérida branch office resolved to join the war. Forty-two men, most of them students of the Sungmu School, volunteered as the first wave of mercenaries. Among them, of course, were the veteran fighters Jo Jangyun, Kim Seokcheol, and Kim Ijeong, but a large number were in their late teens and had been children when they had left Korea. The person Ijeong was most glad to see was Dolseok. He was startled at seeing Ijeong for the first time in seven years and patted his face. “You’ve become an entirely different person!” Dolseok had married a Mayan woman on the hacienda but had been unable to take his wife and children out with him. So he went back to the hacienda, raised a ruckus, and was thrown in jail. He managed to be released when Hwang Sayong and Bang Hwajung had come, but had spent the following years in and out of prison. “Why?” Ijeong asked. Dolseok held up his hands and said, “Light fingers.”

Seo Gijung, who had joined the military at the same time as Jo Jangyun and whose wish had been to go back to Korea and buy land, also came to Mérida. He had wandered around the state of Campeche selling ironware, but had ultimately failed. The last person to arrive was the palace eunuch Kim Okseon. Now in his late forties, he was the oldest of the volunteers. He pleaded to be allowed to join them, saying that this was his last chance in life, and no one could dissuade him. His dream was to open an inn and restaurant in Mérida upon returning from Guatemala. In his restaurant he would play the guitar, which he had recently learned, for his customers. He had first laid a hand on this instrument in the Yucatán, but like a true palace musician he had quickly learned to play it and boasted his own musical style. He tuned his guitar so that it was slightly off-key, and this curious dissonance evoked forlorn feelings in the listener. It was neither a minor key of the West nor a minor key of Korea but Kim Okseon’s unique key, and when the folksongs of the Yucatán and Korea were sung to his music, they were truly beautiful.

Ijeong tried to stop him from going. “It is a jungle there, filled with bugs and wild animals. War is not for people with soft hands like you. And you have never fired a gun.” But Kim Okseon was adamant. “Everyone tried to stop me when I said I was going to Mexico. But look at me now. I easily survived in those brutal henequen fields and made a living even during the turmoil of the revolution. Please, take me with you. If I do not go this time, I will not have another chance to earn such a large sum of money. The henequen trade is finished.”

A few days later, some men sent from the Guatemala revolutionaries arrived and drew up a contract. In the contract it said that the Koreans would always obey the orders of their commanding officers and serve faithfully until the day the Cabrera government fell, and that they would be paid three million dollars as soon as the revolutionary army entered Guatemala City and removed the dictator. The forty-three of them signed their own contracts, and a separate contract, to be signed by the commander of the revolutionary army and the president of the Mérida Korean National Association, was drawn up and signed by Mario and Jo Jangyun. When the signing was over and they were about to embark on their grand undertaking, one more person arrived. It was Bak Gwangsu. He had been making a living repairing pot bottoms, and he sometimes visited Mérida to read people’s fortunes and on rare occasions perform a shamanic ritual. He was thin as a rail but his face had a healthy color. Someone told him that the hacendado Ignacio had been nailed to a cross and died at the cathedral, and Bak Gwangsu answered that he knew. “I heard the shaman died as well,” someone else interjected.

In July 1916, forty-four Korean mercenaries, among them former soldiers, a palace eunuch, a thief, a guerrilla, laborers, orphans, and an apostate priest, followed their Guatemalan guides across the border of Yucatán, through Campeche, and across the Mexico-Guatemala border. With no boundary markers whatsoever in this jungle region, they were unaware for some time that they were already in Guatemala. It was only about 250 miles in a straight line from Mérida to their destination in the Tikal region, but the way was rough.

Their first camp in the jungle hinted at just how rough the road ahead of them would be. Everything there was different from the Yucatán. The humidity was intense and the insects that attacked them were incomparably more vicious than those on the haciendas. Leeches sucked their blood, and mosquitoes bit them through their clothes. There were also bugs that burrowed into flesh, so even if you pulled them out their heads would remain. The Mayan guides adeptly swung their machetes to make a camp. Here, too, the Koreans had to learn everything over again.

The guides pointed at a tall tree. “We communicate with the gods through that tree.” The tree was called ceiba. Its trunk was white and its branches, which rose high enough to compete with the clouds, were surrealistically red, like the abode of gods. They prayed briefly before the ceiba tree, then broke off nearby vines and made ropes to tie up hamacas. In the jungle there was a unique way of living. Huge snakes slept calmly above their heads; monkeys made forays against them.

The Koreans finally reached the revolutionaries’ base of operations in Tikal, in the El Petén department. Tikal contained the grandest ruins of the Mayan civilization in Guatemala, but everything, including the massive pyramids, was covered in lush trees and earth and looked like small hills rising from the flatlands. Not a single one of the Koreans who arrived there after the arduous journey knew that this was a historic ruin. Some of them wondered at the strange stonework or headless stone statues scattered throughout the jungle, but they didn’t take those thoughts any further. Kim Ijeong and Jo Jangyun immediately realized that the lay of the land was such that it could be easily defended. The pyramids, which had been built a thousand years ago, were natural fortresses and lookout towers that allowed a view for dozens of miles in all directions. At the tops of the pyramids were shrines where the priests had dwelled and performed their sacrifices, and these were sturdy enough to be used as bunkers.

Trees that had been growing for a long time rose as if to pierce the sun, and red parrots squawked noisily as they flew between them. The jungle was so dark that fires had to be lit in the middle of the day. The jungle was not quiet. Frogs croaked from all directions, keeping the men up at night. On nights like that, snakes swallowed snakes and frogs ate frogs.

On the day they arrived at Tikal, Jo Jangyun summoned all the men and spoke in a lighthearted voice. “Seeing how we met no resistance on our way here, this place is without a doubt an ownerless land. There is something that I have been thinking about for many years: founding a nation here. When we get our money from them, those who want to go back will go back, but let the rest of us stay here and build a nation. We will call it New Korea, and we will choose a president as they do in the United States. Then let us tell Japan, the United States, and Korea of this, proclaiming to the peoples of the world that our nation is still alive. You saw on the way here that there are many insects and animals in this place, yet it also abounds with trees and fruit, and fertile land and water are abundant, so it is the best place for an industrious people like ourselves to live.” The memory of the failed exodus was still fresh in his mind. “This place is just as good as Hawaii. Even if we were to go to Hawaii, we would have to work for others on the sugar plantations, but here we are free. We can stand boldly as an independent nation. We will call all our brethren scattered through the United States and Mexico to live here, farming and trading. Where else is the old remnant kingdom of Balhae? This is Balhae right here.”