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GUEST LITERATURE – KOREA were just beginning to come to life one by one. Soon, everything foreign on the street would be cloaked in the familiarity of darkness. Chae-geum had moved back in with her father after quitting her factory job to prepare for her departure.When I asked her whether there was anything Korean Chinese liked to buy in a Korean-run store, she explained that she had gone there to exchange some Korean money her fiancé had given her when he came to China.At first, Chae-geum had hung on to it, planning to save it for Korea, but then she’d changed her mind. She had exchanged it for yuan and would now give to her father, who would be living on his own soon. “He will need it more,” she said. She gave me an earnest look. She seemed to be seeking my approval. “You’re a good daughter.” “My father isn’t well. He got one leg injured in a road accident and one eye is blind . . . this one,” she said, pointing to her left eye. Disoriented, I looked straight into her eyes, sensing that what she was pointing at was not her eye at all, but the pitch darkness behind it. While Chae-geum kept on talking, my gaze followed the finger she had used to point at her eye and now used to pick up French fries. “My father saw a man die when he was little,” she’d said. “Ever since that day, he hasn’t been able to see. He was lucky he only saw it with his left eye. If he had seen it with both eyes, he would be xiazi. Do you know what xiazi is?” “Xiazi?” I was asking myself, when Chae-geum cupped her hands over her eyes and I realized it probably meant ‘blind.’ There was a red smear of ketchup on the back of her hand. Maidanglao, ketchup, Korean Chinese, a half-blind man and me – we all seemed to have been tossed together as if by chance, like a table of random numbers. He saw a man being executed when he was eight years old, nearly 50 years ago. Not far from his village, there was to be a public execution, as a criminal had been sentenced to death by firing squad. A crowd gathered, raising a cloud of dust that blocked the view of the clearing where the execution was to take place. It was hot and the sunshine painfully bright, but people stood on their toes, jostling for position so as not to miss any of the events unfolding.That was something an eight-year-old boy simply had to see, so despite his mother’s furious gestures directing him back home, he followed her, craning his neck to see whatever he could from behind her hips.The prisoner, 170 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES
page 173
KIM IN-SOOK his eyes blindfolded and hands tied behind his back, was standing before the pit. The boy could hear the grown-ups whispering to each other. After shooting a prisoner, they’d said, the soldiers would go to his home demanding payment for the bullets fired. The prisoner was not even worthy of the bullets needed to kill him for having committed such an egregious offence.The grown-ups probably concocted the story to scare off the children who had dared to come out and watch the execution, but Chae-geum’s father still believed it 50 years later. The prisoner had been forced to dig the pit that was to be his grave, so the story went, and was shot, leaving behind a corpse with a debt. Chae-geum’s father never found out what crime the man committed. What stuck with him over the years was the debt the man owed for those bullets . . . that was all. The day of the execution, the boy had been frightened but the curiosity of his tender age had won out. There were so many people packed into the clearing that he could barely squeeze half his head into the space between the hips of the grown-ups, but he managed to see everything unfolding before him. All in a rush, several shots rang out, and the prisoner fell into the pit like a scarecrow made of straw. It was over in the blink of an eye. The crowd fell silent amid the rising cloud of dust, and cutting through a silence so profound that not even the sound of someone swallowing disturbed it, came a billowing column of gunpowder smoke. Fifty years after the fact, Chae-geum’s father still remembered that smell in his nostrils. Gunpowder . . . the smell of death, or the smell of the shock of those still standing. Continued online . . . To read the whole of this story please go to www.banipal.co.uk/selections Kim In-sook made her literary debut at the age of 20 when her short story was named winner of the annual spring literary competition sponsored by The Chosun Ilbo. In her body of work, Kim has focused on social issues during the turbulent dictatorship of the 1980s, the convergence of private and public realms, and the lives of Koreans residing abroad. She has published ten novels and five story collections, and is the recipient of major Korean literary prizes, including the the Hankook Ilbo Literary Awards. BANIPAL 43 – SPRING 2012 171

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GUEST LITERATURE – KOREA

were just beginning to come to life one by one. Soon, everything foreign on the street would be cloaked in the familiarity of darkness.

Chae-geum had moved back in with her father after quitting her factory job to prepare for her departure.When I asked her whether there was anything Korean Chinese liked to buy in a Korean-run store, she explained that she had gone there to exchange some Korean money her fiancé had given her when he came to China.At first, Chae-geum had hung on to it, planning to save it for Korea, but then she’d changed her mind. She had exchanged it for yuan and would now give to her father, who would be living on his own soon. “He will need it more,” she said. She gave me an earnest look. She seemed to be seeking my approval.

“You’re a good daughter.” “My father isn’t well. He got one leg injured in a road accident and one eye is blind . . . this one,” she said, pointing to her left eye. Disoriented, I looked straight into her eyes, sensing that what she was pointing at was not her eye at all, but the pitch darkness behind it. While Chae-geum kept on talking, my gaze followed the finger she had used to point at her eye and now used to pick up French fries.

“My father saw a man die when he was little,” she’d said. “Ever since that day, he hasn’t been able to see. He was lucky he only saw it with his left eye. If he had seen it with both eyes, he would be xiazi. Do you know what xiazi is?”

“Xiazi?” I was asking myself, when Chae-geum cupped her hands over her eyes and I realized it probably meant ‘blind.’ There was a red smear of ketchup on the back of her hand. Maidanglao, ketchup, Korean Chinese, a half-blind man and me – we all seemed to have been tossed together as if by chance, like a table of random numbers.

He saw a man being executed when he was eight years old, nearly 50 years ago. Not far from his village, there was to be a public execution, as a criminal had been sentenced to death by firing squad. A crowd gathered, raising a cloud of dust that blocked the view of the clearing where the execution was to take place. It was hot and the sunshine painfully bright, but people stood on their toes, jostling for position so as not to miss any of the events unfolding.That was something an eight-year-old boy simply had to see, so despite his mother’s furious gestures directing him back home, he followed her, craning his neck to see whatever he could from behind her hips.The prisoner,

170 BANIPAL 43 – CELEBRATING DENYS JOHNSON-DAVIES

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