Your Republic Is Calling You (19 page)

The group thought Ki-yong was a not too bright but dedicated, circumspect activist, which was the kind of person everyone sought to recruit. People who asked too many questions or bragged that they were official members of the group were not welcome. Ki-yong wasn't like that, not that he could be even if he wanted to. He just periodically asked whether Juche Ideology really was the greatest ideology in the history of philosophy. He'd cautiously ask: "When all things and ideologies are supposed to change and develop in a dialectical manner, how can all processes stop when it comes to Juche Ideology?" But the others had a ready answer for this question because it was one that everyone asked, and laughed off his comments. Ki-yong listened to their impassioned but ultimately unpersuasive answers and nodded along. Their blind belief in Juche Ideology actually started to chip away at his own ideological certainty. How could they believe all of it without harboring any doubts, after reading
only a couple of thin pamphlets and incomplete broadcast transcripts of the National Democratic Front of South Korea? A few members even argued that Juche Ideology was so powerful precisely because it was easy to understand. Unlike difficult and confusing bourgeois philosophies, this was a new idea that workers could adopt as their own, created with their comprehension in mind by the generous leader. Ki-yong's few questions, which he posed only to ensure a perfect disguise, boomeranged back at his soul.

After he became a member of the Juche Ideology faction in compliance with his initial orders, the Party didn't send down orders for a while. He lay in the dark in his room at the boardinghouse and wondered what Pyongyang ultimately wanted from him. He didn't fully comprehend the meaning behind the order—why he, a member of the Workers Party of Korea, had to pretend to learn about Juche Ideology instead of leading these students. Only after a long time did he come to the conclusion that Lee Sang-hyok and other power players in Pyongyang wanted him not to lead the South's student activism, but to assume a persona formed by authentic experiences. Liaison Office 130 might have wanted him to obtain a criminal record by breaking a group demonstration law. It was crucial that he copy everything the Southerners did—if he wanted to be exactly like them—without circumventing the scars they received in the process.

But fortunately—or unfortunately—he was never arrested. It was partly because he had been trained to evade arrest, but it was also because he didn't stand out in a crowd. He was often skipped over when the group, at a bar, counted how many people were there. Sometimes a bunch of them would be talking among themselves and suddenly notice Ki-yong sitting next to them and ask, surprised, when he got there. But a couple of members always remembered and included him, in spite of his invisibility. The young Juche Ideology faction members, though they attended rallies, defiantly handing out leaflets and throwing Molotov cocktails at cops, were really only boys who had grown up too quickly, whose faces were covered with acne scars. They went out for spicy rice cakes, talked about girls they had crushes on, and obsessed over Hong Kong movies like
A Better Tomorrow.
On New Year's, knowing Ki-yong didn't have family, they would bring him home with them and share a bowl of rice cake soup.

One summer day, three of them—a disheveled guy who went by the nickname Magpie, another who answered to Snout, and Ki-yong, who was known as Hammer—visited Wolmi Island near Inchon. Magpie, drunk off soju and the marine wind, lay across a bench on the beach and asked: "Do you guys think the revolution will come?"

Magpie's older brother was a loyal activist and a central theorist of a minority group known as PD. As someone who had given everything to the student movement, he opposed Magpie going to college.
What's the point of going to college when it will only make you a servant of the bourgeoisie? You might as well go straight into the factories and organize the workers. Learn from my mistakes. I'm always regretting that it took me so long to quit college to organize the factories. You should become a worker as soon as you can and throw yourself into class struggle, so you can live without guilt like I do.
Having always been close to his older brother, growing up together in a single-room house without space for even a desk, Magpie had a difficult time dealing with this pressure. Magpie's brother even confiscated his books and threw out the apple crate he was using as a desk.
Oh, so you don't want me to go to college when you got to go? At least you got to go to college in the first place.
Magpie, feeling rebellious, studied hard,
hiding it from his brother, and got into Yonsei. But just like his brother, he became deeply involved in the student movement as soon as he stepped foot on campus and he never went near a lecture hall. The only difference was that he chose a different group from his brother and became an NL, accepting Juche Ideology as the fundamental truth.

Snout replied: "Don't you think it will happen at some point?"

"Actually," Magpie said, carefully, "I'm afraid that it will happen."

"What do you mean?"

"If the revolution happens, I won't be able to go rent comic books or play video games."

Snout nodded, although he would have sat up straight and rebutted that sentiment if he hadn't been so drunk, saying, "Yeah, you wouldn't be able to do any of that."

"I mean, even if we ousted America and overturned the dictatorship and smashed the imperialist, feudal system and the world became the kind of place where every man was the master of his destiny ... then what? What would we do? Wouldn't we be bored?"

Ki-yong quietly listened to their conversation, thinking that they really had no idea what it was like to live in a world where everyone got up at the same time when the morning siren went off at seven, went to work at the same time, got a Sunday off only when the Central Committee of the Party mandated it, and came together with the whole community every night to rehash and criticize the day's mistakes. Of course, you could be happy in a society like that. You could play badminton or a pick-up game of soccer, or ice-skate. But you wouldn't be able to sit by yourself in a dark room watching porn, listen to the Eagles through your earphones, or read violent Japanese manga.

Snout, noticing Ki-yong's silence, nudged him. "What do you think?"

"I don't know. You probably wouldn't be able to do any of that. I'm sure it'll be a little boring, like Magpie says. But couldn't it be fun in its own way?" Ki-yong replied.

Years later, Ki-yong often recalled the conversation they had that day at Wolmi Island. They worried about the quality of life after the revolution that would never come, sitting on a beach strewn with young lovers and drunk, singing soldiers on leave, smelling whiffs of salty marine wind. Instead of revolution, the International Monetary Fund came in and completely restructured South Korea, like the American military did in 1945.

In the 1980s, when Ki-yong was in college, South Korea was closer to North Korea than it was to today's South. Jobs were guaranteed for life and college students never worried about their futures. The banks and conglomerates, with their lobbies of imported marble, seemed indestructible. Adult children took care of their parents and respected them. The president was chosen by a huge margin, through indirect election, and the opposition party existed only in name. Most people weren't too interested in the world beyond South Korea's borders. The North's motto, "Let's Live Our Way," described South Korea during the 1980s. In redistributing resources, the government's whim was more powerful than market principles, so government employees were severely corrupted by rampant bribes and fraudulent dealings, just like in the North. All students, whether they were in high school or college, were in the government-controlled students' national defense corps, heading to school a few times a week in drill uniforms. And once a month the entire citizenry would participate in civil defense drills. The capitals of both countries would turn pitch black once every
few months for the mandatory blackout drills, initiated to better prepare for possible air raids.

The South today is nothing like the South of the 1980s. Today's South is actually a completely different country, one that morphed organically into something different from the North. Now it's probably more like Singapore or France. Married couples don't feel the need to have children, the per capita income is around twenty thousand dollars, the futures of banks and large conglomerates aren't set in stone, tens of thousands of foreigners arrive every year to marry Koreans and to obtain jobs, and elementary school students fly out of Inchon International Airport daily to study English abroad. Russian guns are sold in Pusan, sex partners are found on-line, people watch live broadcasts of the Winter Olympics on their cell phones, San Franciscan Ecstasy is transported in FedEx boxes, and half the Korean population invests in mutual funds. The president, humorless and unable to laugh off satire, is the target of jeers, and a party representing the workers was elected to the National Assembly for the first time after liberation from the Japanese occupation. If Ki-yong had predicted that the South would change like this in twenty years, he would have been treated like he was crazy.

Sitting on a red plastic Lotteria chair in Chongno o-ga, Ki-yong thinks about the three countries he's lived in—North Korea, the South of the 1980s and 1990s, and the South of the twenty-first century. One is already a relic of history. He is standing at a fork in the road of his life. Which should he choose, the North or the South? For the first time in his life, he wants to kneel in front of someone and ask: What would you do? No, he would just ask, What do you think I should do? For the past twenty years, he believed that he was working a job that was a little more dangerous than your average one. In a world filled with large-scale layoffs and series
of bankruptcies, collapses of department stores and bridges and fires in the subways, he didn't think that his life as a forgotten spy was that perilous. But he forgot about his destiny, which hadn't forgotten about him, just like Paul Bourget's poem that stated, One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.

Ki-yong's cell vibrates. It's Song-gon. He presses the talk button.

"Hello, sir, it's me."

"Hi, Song-gon."

"I just got back from buying the keyboard, and I was wondering where you were."

"Oh, sorry. Something came up. I don't know if I'll be back in the office today."

There's a brief silence. Normally, he wouldn't think twice about it. But with his nerves on edge, he feels this silence to be very unnatural.

"But ... where are you?"

"Why, did someone ask for me?" he says, calmly.

"No, but I was wondering what I should tell people if they ask for you?"

"Just tell them to call back tomorrow."

"Sure, sure. Oh, and—"

Ki-yong cuts him off. "Sorry, I have to go. I'm talking to someone."

"Okay, got it—" Song-gon is speaking too slowly.

Ki-yong hangs up on him and powers off his phone. He's unsettled. He has a nagging thought that he shouldn't have trusted his own employee. It's a feeling he experienced as he was coming South on the midget submarine from Haeju. The vessel descended slowly, after filling up its oxygen tanks. He'd been excited at the prospect of embarking on a voyage
into the vast ocean but at the same time had felt a little claustrophobic from being shut up in the small submarine. He'd given in to a feeling of intense but temporary resignation. There wasn't anything he could do, at least not while they were underwater. Especially for Communists, who aren't able to depend on God or prayer for everything, there was nothing to do other than to consciously surrender to the situation. This sensation is what Ki-yong recalls right at this moment.

He enters a cell phone store. The employee greets him cheerfully. Ki-yong smiles, a little embarrassed, and asks, "Do you have any prepaid phones?"

The clerk, who has punkish hair sculpted with wax, squints at him. "Prepaid phones? What kind are you looking for?"

Ki-yong scratches his head, sheepish. "I can't really open an account under my name because I have bad credit..."

The clerk understands quickly. He takes out an old cell phone from a drawer, covered in scratches and nicks.

"How much is it?" Ki-yong asks. He adds an extra bill on top of what the clerk tells him. The clerk, his face expressionless, tells him that he doesn't know in whose name the phone is registered, and that Ki-yong doesn't have to know either. Pressing several buttons, he shows Ki-yong how to use the phone. Ki-yong thanks him and leaves.

I
F HE CONCENTRATES,
Chol-su can hear the billiard balls, faintly, hitting against one another downstairs. He closes his eyes once in a while to listen to their clicks. They sound like heavy snow breaking branches in the dark of the night.
Crack. Clack.
That kind of snow, heavy with moisture, falls quietly onto branches struggling to remain whole. Tree
branches are groomed to reach for the sky, stretching higher than the other branches in order to obtain more sunlight. With too much snow piled on it, any branch will break.

When his father's earnings as a comedian weren't sufficient, Chol-su was sent to his grandparents' house in Hoenggye, in the foothills of Taegwallyong in Kangwon Province, two thousand feet above sea level. Potato fields surrounded Chol-su's grandparents' house. Their roof was built low to the ground to withstand strong winter winds, and it was secured at the ends with rocks. A stroke had left Chol-su's grandfather with a limp, and his grandmother was mentally disabled. Despite his pronounced handicap, Grandfather was able to do everything. Their small storage room was filled to the brim with firewood, and they had more than enough potatoes, corn, and rice. During the last week of October, Grandfather would pick up a hoe and dig holes, where he would bury pots of kimchi for the winter. Grandmother was slow, but she wasn't dumb or crazy. She was consistent, a warm and quiet being who loved Chol-su more than anyone else, and was capable of expressing every ounce of that love. Chol-su's gentle, sweet grandmother was a rare soul amid the stoic grandmothers who populated the hills of Kangwon Province. She wasn't good with numbers—in fact, she knew basically nothing about them, as she had a hard time understanding any number beyond five—and didn't know how to read, but she didn't have any problem understanding what people said. When young Chol-su read his children's books out loud for her, Grandmother would lie on her stomach like a kid, immersed in the stories.