hankyoreh

By Lee Ji-nu, Photojournalist

At one time, my workroom walls were veritably plastered in maps, drawn in 1/5000 scale. In 1994, the local maps of Gangwon Province hung in a prominent spot among those records of place, as I had decided to embark on a journey to explore a particular strip of land beside the shore.

I set off on my journey. By wheel or on foot, I covered every valley and dale. No matter how deeply I ventured into the thicket of the craggy hills, there were always locals that seemed to be waiting to greet me. Among the countless people I encountered, there is one I still remember with crystal clarity. His name is Lee Yeong-gwang, and he is 60 years old.

It was the fifth of May. Taking my chances, I hazarded an outing into the Danim valley of Bukpyeong-myeon, Jeongseon-gun. Though the local road remains unpaved to this day, cement bridges now hang over the brooklets leading to it. At the time, though, I had no choice but to ford four streams in my jeep, submerging the front bumper into the current. Some eight kilometers deep into the backwoods, I found myself deep in a valley radiant in the bloom of royal azaleas and leaves newly sprouted, which danced across tree branches and speckled the horizon. The dirt road was tranquil, and strands of sunlight warmed my skin. When I reached the valley's edge, the first house appeared. Sporadically built, a couple of kilometers between them, there were no more than a half dozen abodes in all in that lonely valley.

No one was home. I meandered through the valley basin and into the hills above it, but all I encountered was silence. Finally, peeking into the yard of one house, I found signs of life: underwear, socks and towels hung up to dry. I plunked myself down on the vacant porch, and called out. There was no response. I called out again. The only response was the cry of birds from the treetops. Just as I was about to stand up and depart, a man opened the front door. His accent was as alien as his appearance. Before long, it dawned upon me that I had heard the inflection before, from the lips of old natives from North Korea’s Hamgyeong Province. Yet Lee Yeong-gwang, a man of only some fifty years in age, seemed out of place uttering such a tongue in the heart of South Korea.

On his door were penciled perplexing words in crooked letters:

"Spring's first day, sunbeams on the floor."

"Two o’clock in the morning, moonlight."

It was then that my 1970s South Korean anti-communist education kicked in, as suspicion welled up within me of this gaunt man drawling on in words of a northeastern dialect, cryptic code scribbled on his door. For a second, I forgot my place on the political spectrum. Though I had grown up believing myself to be progressive, sending articles off to papers of a liberal bent, any pretense to leftism crumbled before the anti-Communist propaganda that marked my childhood. It was about that time I began to fully understand the predilection of successive Korean governments to manipulate North Korean spying incidents to alarm the citizenry.

Yet any wariness I had held dissolved that night. In a room with peeling wallpaper and dining on brackish kimchi and rice soggy enough to be porridge, we talked late into the night. He had crossed over to the South on September 18, 1967. His aspiration, albeit lofty in any circumstance, was preposterous given his situation at the time: to travel the world. It was for this reason that the public ceremony to celebrate his arrival was abnormally modest, despite the politically charged anti-North atmosphere. Though the authorities expected him to proclaim he had come seeking the freedom of the South, his insistence on merely holding a desire to travel the world left them flummoxed. Though a young man, 20 years of age, who had risked his life to traverse the precarious DMZ, he was of no value to the government. It was for this reason that the ceremony celebrating his "changing of allegiances" was combined with that of Kim Sin-jo, the North Korean agent seized whilst attempting to storm the Blue House in 1968. Though they were both welcomed in the same event, he might as well have been a sideshow to Kim’s taking the main stage.

That night spent sitting on an earthen floor, I was transported the banks of the Duman (Tumen) River and the fields of wildflowers found on the Gaema plateau of the North’s Hamgyeong Province, through the heartbreaking story of a 16-year-old boy’s first love. He spoke on, deep into the night, taking hardly a pause. There was not so much as a pause for me to squeeze a word in. I might as well have fallen ill with some disease and lost my tongue. Subsequent encounters thereafter were the same. Dropping in when I passed by, his words came in rapid fire. Finally one day, I jumped in and asked him about messages scrawled on his door. "Oh, that... Well, I was lying down, and I thought of how nice the moonlight was, but I didn’t have anyone to tell my thoughts to," he explained.

Such is the loneliness of seclusion. That loneliness was not a wall built by will, but rather like a boulder already in place, rigid and unyielding. He had words to say, but no one to say them to. Words grew weary within him, and he had learned to release them through snippets of graffiti on any surface that presented itself. His transcriptions, though, were sharp and concise, like Haiku poetry. His loneliness, lucid as it was, manifested itself in curious ways during my absences. I never saw him outside of that desolate part of the country, and he never offered to escort me out, giving one excuse or another for why he could not emerge from his valley home.

This was once the young man who bore the dream of traveling the world. Such aspirations, however, did not meld with the reality of South Korean society at the time, leaving him to the unfamiliar experience of isolation. It was possible to live as an individual with a personal role, but not as a member of the group with a corresponding societal role. To borrow the notions set forth by anthropologist Philip K. Bock, he was a stranger to us, just as we were to him.

He had a wealth of experiences that were alien to us, and our ideologies, manners, and customs were widely disparate with the world he knew. Thus, though we could at least tolerate and accept him on the surface, we could not go so far as to completely forgive him for once donning the garb of communism. It would seem, though, that such feelings were mutual, that he could not forgive us for being so opposite to what he once believed; this may have been the very core of his loneliness. It was the kind of weight a man as sensitive as he could never bear, and so he left society to unburden himself of it, hiding in the forest. Yet despite trying to leave it behind, he arrived only to find a different feeling of forlornness. Indeed, in his absolute isolation, he had no further means to escape from the new kind of loneliness he had discovered.

When thinking of him trembling in loneliness, I am left to ponder on what exactly it means to be "different from us." Indeed, I shudder, too, thinking of the cruel tendency of Koreans to calmly accept - nay, to actively manipulate - the division of our people, as seen now for over half a century. Perhaps I, too, consciously or not, believe that what is different from me is bad. After all, I have been taught as much since my youth. Perhaps the tendency of my early years to not acknowledge or be intolerable to difference is of the same strain of thought that brought about the partition of our country.

But men do not fade away easily from this world. Though he forswore the world to live alone in the Dungok valley, a gift of sorts was bound for Lee as well: a companion, now his wife. Her name is Park An-ja. Though I refer to her as my "sister-in-law," and Lee as my "older brother," I hardly know anything about her except that she comes from Busan. Perhaps I do not want to know any more - to remain the perennial stranger - but regardless, I do not press, and neither is Lee forthcoming. Indeed, when I see her, I only inquire as to whether she is well. "Well? I am wonderful," she replies, a smile blossoming on her face. The interesting thing is that since they began living together, Lee has become strangely quiet. I suppose it is because he is no longer lonely.

Eight years have passed since their marriage. When I called asking if I could write about him, his wife answered the phone, her voice brimming with cheer. They had just returned from Geumgang Mountain to celebrate her 60th birthday, she told me. After chatting with her for a while, I asked for my older brother. "He can’t come to the phone," she said. "He’s meditating."

I paused in contemplation. Perhaps he was, at that moment, thinking of his homeland, and perhaps the spot in his heart once occupied by loneliness has now been filled by nostalgia toward that close yet distant place. I once had made a promise with Lee: to walk with him through the wildflower fields of Gaema plateau. He had told me that one could not walk 100 meters there without his shoes and socks being dyed with pollen.

I yearn to go there. Though we made that promise when he was a bachelor, imaging that the two of us would walk those fields, now he has married, so I suppose I might tag along as the odd man out. Yet even so, I still want to go. With each passing year, the same thought comes to mind. Unification must not be, cannot be pushed off any longer. There is no reason to delay. I long to go to the scene of his first date in the timber yards by the banks of the Duman (Tumen) River, and my heart aches to visit the hometown where he spent his childhood. Yet above all else, what I yearn to see is the look on my older brother’s face when he sets foot in those places once again.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]