Everything Belongs to Us Page 3

  “You should go home,” he said. It seemed crazy that she should be lingering around here where anyone could see her. He remembered what Juno had said about the blacklist. “You should go home and say you weren’t here at all.”

  “But—you see, I can’t.” She seemed emboldened by his mention of home. “I think there’s a market around the corner. I can’t give you any money now, but I’ll send it to you, I swear.”

  He realized she was unwilling to say the word shirt, calling attention to her nudity, but that’s what she needed. She could not come out of the alley and go home without it. A shirt.

  He backed away. “I’m sorry—I can’t,” he mumbled.

  He turned and ran, knowing she wouldn’t—or couldn’t—call after him. He told himself that someone else would come along to help her. A nice older ajumma. The girl was one of the lucky ones, after all. She had gotten away. All she needed was a shirt.

  “I’m sorry!” He yelled it this time, buoyed by sudden inspiration. A shirt.

  He ran around the corner to the market she’d mentioned. It was a small hole-in-the-wall store, the owner a grandmother who sat cross-legged on a low stool, eating an apple with big cracking bites.

  “A lady’s shirt,” he said. He motioned toward his own chest as if that would clarify what he wanted. “An undershirt.” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word bra. An undershirt was good enough. It would do. He could rough it up and make it just right.

  The grandmother motioned to the corner where she had them piled up, rubber-banded by size. Sunam picked the smallest one, sleeveless and stiff, a bit of lace at the neck. The new cotton was thick and glaringly white, but he already had a plan. He would soak it in the puddle outside, make a few tears. He would drag it along the curb and trample it until it was dingy and gray. He wondered if there was any way he could simulate blood.

  He had the golden ticket. Finally he could proudly say to Juno, Look, sunbae, I did as you asked. He had completed the impossible task. And it had cost him less than a pack of cigarettes.

  After the arrests, the women said they had not planned to remove their shirts. That it had happened spontaneously: an act of last-resort defiance. When it began, Jisun was far from the center. She didn’t know the woman who started it, but she felt the ground tilting as woman after woman threw off her shirt and linked arms with her neighbor, anchoring one another against the attack. She joined them, flinging off her shirt and bra, trampling the garments underfoot. Fused in a human chain of resistance.

  In the vans, the police reprimanded them like children. Is this how you girls were taught to behave? What—ajumma, you’re too old for these shenanigans. Are you a mother, behaving like this?

  It was warm in the van with so many bodies pressed together, but some girls hugged themselves, shivering, their lips nearly white with the effort of holding back tears. Those who still had shirts or kerchiefs removed them and passed them on to the undressed women, leaving just a bra or undershirt for themselves. Jisun untied the kerchief from her hair and covered herself with it. It was almost sheer with sweat and useless. Remembering how terrified she had been at her first arrest, she wished she had something to offer the younger girls—if only just a smile or reassuring word—but they had withdrawn into themselves and would not meet her eyes. Someone started to sing. An older woman with a good folk voice, now hoarse from shouting. Saeya, saeya palang saeya. They had been singing it since the first day of the strike, a simple peasants’ song asking the bird not to devour the crops. A minor-key lullaby, cyclical and easy on an empty stomach. But here in tight quarters, interpreted by this strong, rough voice, Jisun could see the sky and fields. She heard the farmer counting his plants, fearing a lean winter.

  Hey, bird, don’t sit in my field.

  If the green pea flower drops—

  The merchant will go crying.

  “Why do we sing this song?” Jisun asked. “It’s not the bird’s fault for eating.”

  The singing woman had started again—“Saeya, saeya…”—but stopped at Jisun’s question. “It’s not the farmer’s fault for hating the bird either.”

  “All the more reason,” Jisun said. “We need a different song.”

  If they were going to sing such a song, she wanted to hear herself in the story.

  The woman picked up again and sang it through to the end. She hummed a few bars of the beginning. It was a song that could not end at the end. A song that demanded repetition.

  “Bird and farmer, natural enemies. Old, old song.”

  “But you see, we need to have a different cycle, because it’s not natural for us—”

  Jisun couldn’t finish because of the way the woman was looking at her.

  “That’s the difference between you students and us,” the ajumma said quietly. “You students think everything is an argument. We have to work to eat, we can’t just quibble with words all the time. Old songs are for comfort, not ideology.”

  “But I agree with you, ajumma,” Jisun protested. “I’m critical of these attitudes just as much as you are. I only meant we have an opportunity to represent a different message. Something stronger that might go further in clarifying our demands….”

  A smile played across the older woman’s lips. “Do you want to debate me, then, right here and now? Wait, we better organize a meeting and take a vote,” she said. Despite the clear sarcasm, there was a calm and gentle quality to her voice, as if she were simply explaining a fairy tale to a child. “But first we must collect everyone’s suggestions for better songs. This could take a while. We should also make sure to elect a proper leader of this committee.”

  Without raising her voice or even letting the harsh edge of bitterness creep into her words, the woman had perfectly won her point. Jisun felt her heart slamming against her chest, her face prickling with shame. She wanted to say so many things: about how she was not just a student playing activist for fun. Or the kind of student activist who spouted philosophy and argued theories all day long. Protests quivered on the tip of her tongue: I’ve given up everything to be here. I share your position exactly. But it was not true—they were not in the same position, nor would they ever be. And Jisun had committed the cardinal error: lecturing without permission or proper experience. Forcing amends now would not help.

  Jisun bowed in apology. Her father had taught her this. To condemn her mistakes with the strongest possible conviction. To never let anyone defeat her with shame.

  “You’re right, ajumma. We call people like me mongmul.”

  Mongmul, diluted ink. People who pretended intellectual superiority in activism but barely lifted a finger to work.

  Patting her arm, the ajumma picked up the refrain where she’d left off. “Saeya, saeya…” Little bird, little bird…Singing, rocking, she held on to Jisun’s arm for a long time—an intimate gesture, maternal and possessive—as if to say, This one I claim, I accept.

  The air inside the van grew heavy. Sweat dripped and pooled between Jisun’s breasts. But the hand stayed on her arm, firm and dry.

  Jisun’s father, Ahn Kiyu, owned the largest shipping conglomerate in South Korea. Three years younger than the president, he would proudly point out that, like Park, he was a self-made man from a humble family. To Jisun’s father, Park Chung Hee was half brother, half deity. Never an affectionate or expressive man, he loved Park with a nearly boyish infatuation. Jisun was just a toddler in 1961 when Park—then general, not president—staged his military coup, but she had been raised on stories of Park the way other children were plied with fables and nursery rhymes.

  “Think what it meant to be among the poorest countries in the world,” Jisun’s father would say. “Wondering how long we’d be trapped in this fate when all our politicians and so-called leaders could do was kowtow to foreign governments, begging for aid. Licking their boots as if we were starving dogs with no plans of our own. But President Park had the vision to say, No, we will be modern and autonomous. We will have a national economy using our own
resources, our own power. What do you think it meant for us to hear that? He gave this country back to the people.”

  Even as a young girl, she found it strange to hear her father describe their country as among the poorest in the world. Jisun was not blind—she saw the beggars in the street and the children, younger than she was, who fought one another to be allowed to polish a passerby’s shoes for a couple of pennies. Skinny, bedraggled boys darted around traffic all day, hoping to sell bits of stolen candy and gum to pedestrians and drivers at intersections. But even before the Ahn family moved to the big mansion on the cliffs overlooking central Seoul, Jisun and her brother, Min, had never known a single moment of feeling poor. They had always had more than enough, more than she was comfortable admitting to her classmates at school, who seemed to envy her and treat her differently because she had better clothes, a telephone and TV at home, and even a private family car.

  But it was not until Jisun started middle school and met Namin Kang, who had to bus an hour every morning and afternoon from a poor, working-class neighborhood of Seoul called Miari, who seemed to know things that she, Jisun, had never thought about, that she began to feel differently about President Park. Their neighborhoods were only about ten miles apart, but Jisun lived in an estate amid lush gardens, whereas Namin lived without indoor plumbing or hot water. Jisun’s father owned a huge company with so many employees that Jisun didn’t know whether they numbered in the hundreds or thousands. Namin’s parents ran a pojangmacha, a tented food cart that served cheap liquor and fried, spicy food from early morning to near midnight. Her older sister, Kyungmin, worked at a shoe factory.

  Namin didn’t like to talk about her family or living situation, but Jisun was nosy and persistent. She knew Namin sometimes lied to other schoolmates about where she lived or why she didn’t have the things most girls at their school took for granted. Maybe it was because Jisun was so shamelessly curious about her friend’s life, or maybe it was Namin’s way of standing up for herself, of facing down some private, inward challenge, but she never seemed to lie to Jisun. It was a different kind of education. A powerful counterpoint against her father’s narrative of the new South Korea led by President Park and supported by a hardworking and patriotic labor force, happy to toil away their days for the sake of national prosperity.

  That year, President Park declared a state of national emergency, banning public demonstrations and enacting martial law. Jisun began to understand that the president beloved by her father was a tyrant. He had not “restored the country back to the Korean people,” as her father claimed, but had taken it from them with threats of tanks and summary execution.

  Over the next three years, there would be nine emergency decrees added to the constitution, the last of which prohibited any kind of antigovernment activity.

  By 1975, Jisun was supposed to be preparing for her college exams, expecting to follow in her older brother’s footsteps to Seoul National University. While pretending to show an interest in the campus, Jisun secretly soaked up the invisible thrum of collegiate activism. The demo groups had been driven underground, but she knew they were still active and present by the continual whiff of tear gas in the air and the riot soldiers stationed at the gate. Tattered remains of protest placards that had been torn down blew over the quad. Sometimes she caught a big enough piece to make out a few words. Jisun collected these fragments, knowing even this was a risk. She didn’t fully understand what these young activists were fighting for, but she treasured these bits.

  Mongmul. Diluted ink.

  Hakppiri. Fake, useless intellectual.

  Pijijok. Bourgeois.

  There were weapons within the student activist community that could keep a person in line. Rules of language, clothing, behavior, and consumption. Permitted leisure activities. Sanctioned cigarettes one could smoke: domestic brands such as Eunhasu and Hansando, never the imports. Foreign beers signaled decadence, whereas local liquors such as soju and makkoli identified with the poor and working-class people, morally superior to the bourgeoisie and elite yangban class. Women wore short hair, sloppy T-shirts and jeans, and sneakers without logos. Men wore dyed black military jackets because surplus army clothing was cheap and made to last—and because this was how the poor who had neither the time nor the money to worry about fashion dressed.

  But fashion and behavior aside, no one could call herself an activist without becoming familiar to the point of obsession with the curriculum. The curriculum was an underground circulation of banned texts: Western books that the government had deemed a “negative influence” to national security, statements from jailed dissidents, and diaries of symbolic figures such as Jeon Taeil, the twenty-two-year-old garment worker who had self-immolated in 1970 to protest wretched working conditions. The curriculum was the backbone of the activist community, inspiring newcomers to join the cause and strengthening the resolve of experienced leaders. It was like having access to a secret set of keys—the greater your expertise in these texts, the higher you would travel in the ranks of respect.

  More than any official class, the curriculum and the underground seminars that dealt with readings of these texts in a question/answer format became Jisun’s true education. Question. Answer. Question. Answer. Each one like discovering a civilization directly beneath her feet. She could go to a seminar meeting every day of the week and never attend a real university class. If she chewed on a good poem for ten days, she felt like the bear of the Tangun legend who became human by surviving on garlic and the bitter sook for one hundred days, thereafter earning the honor of becoming the mother of the first Korean kingdom. Like the mythical bear, Jisun felt that she was being rewarded for her perseverance and would one day see a great and meaningful future.

  Question: Why was the bear permitted to eat only garlic and sook?

  Answer: To purify the blood. To toughen the heart and sharpen the tongue. There is nothing more painful than being reborn.

  Question: Why did the tiger fail?

  Answer: The tiger lasted only twenty days, already considering himself king of the beasts.

  But at home, Jisun’s father continued to support the president. “No one loves this country more than our president does,” her father would say. “He understands the sacrifices we need and works harder than anyone, sacrifices more than anyone. Do you see the humble clothes he wears? The long distances he travels to make sure we are represented well in the world and given all the opportunities we deserve? We must pursue development first and foremost” was her father’s inevitable conclusion, echoing the famous presidential decree. “Development first. Then democracy.”

  —

  AFTER THE VANS returned to the station, the officers packed the women into a holding area. This consisted of four long cells subdivided by bars painted a glaring primary blue, more appropriate for a kindergarten than a city jail. The floors were pitted concrete that was slick in areas from a recent hosing, but the water seemed to have awakened the smells of urine and excrement rather than washing them away. The women tried to huddle away from the obvious puddles, the splatters of vomit and what they hoped was not blood, but there were too many of them to spare the space. Someone had to stand in the mess. Jisun, without meaning to, stopped short and let someone else be pushed into the worst of it.

  She counted fifty-seven women in her cell and the adjoining ones, as far as she could see. They were standing nearly hip to hip. Sitting down was out of the question, unless they made a group effort to allow certain women to do so. Using the toilet would also require an announcement—unless you were unlucky enough to be standing near it already. How would they possibly spend the night like this, pressed together like caged livestock? At least the chickens in the market could breathe fresh air.

  Of course, Jisun never found out.

  It took less than an hour for the authorities to realize who she was and hurry her out of the cell into the office to wait. When the guard called her name, she already knew what to expect: she had been identified and
would be released, as she had the other times. If she resisted, they would haul her out bodily. A punch line: Dragged in, dragged out. She would not let that happen. She would walk out on her own two feet, denying the cops that satisfaction, at least.

  “Hurry up. Move it, princess.”

  In the long seconds it took to squeeze through the mass of bodies and through the unlocked cell gate, Jisun felt more exposed than if she were completely naked. The eyes of her fellow inmates bored into the back of her skull. The guard slammed the gate behind her, then checked the lock with an unnecessary jangle of keys. He shoved a stiff inmate’s T-shirt in her hands and waited, leering, while she put it on.

  Somebody yelled, “Hey! Where’re you taking her! Guard, what’d she do?” A few other women took up the cry, shaking the bars and reaching for her hand.

  The tears seemed to burn as they rushed down Jisun’s cheeks. She had never cried at the police station, not even at her first arrest when she was certain they would treat her more harshly to make an example of her. How wrong she had been. It was true that the police hated student protesters, whom they viewed as overprivileged troublemakers. But contrary to her fears, Jisun’s status as her father’s daughter had set her apart in a different way. It made the authorities afraid to touch her, afraid to do anything that might incite Ahn Kiyu’s displeasure and rain down inconvenient consequences on themselves.

  The police had discovered who she was, but her fellow activists did not know, nor did they understand that she was being released. Whoever it was that had spoken up, a stranger, had thought Jisun was being singled out for something worse. By raising the alarm, the brave woman had risked being next.

  “Sister!” the woman continued shouting after her. “Tell us your name so we can tell your people where you are. We will not let you be forgotten!”

  Jisun wanted to beg the woman’s forgiveness, to thank her for her courage and tell her not to worry. But she was too ashamed to attract further attention to herself, nor could she explain where she was really going. It was best to remain silent and hope the woman would soon forget about her.