The following are translated excerpts from South Korean poet and activist Song Kyung-dong’s essay collection, Dreamers Are Dragged Away (Silcheon Press, 2011).
“One vibrant day in May”
It happened on a Saturday during my high school years—a clear spring day when the sky was dazzlingly blue and the air filled with possibilities. We had been cleaning the classroom, darting between the desks and chairs like minnows, when we heard the voice. All became still.
“The following students must report to the principal’s office immediately.”
Filtering in from the speakers, the announcement sounded unusually urgent and serious. The voice, with an undercurrent of resentment and suppressed anger, recited a list of students’ names, along with which class they were in, when I suddenly caught my name among theirs.
The kids named had one thing in common: we were all members of the school literature club. Model students, in other words—good-natured, well-mannered, the last people to do anything that might warrant being summoned to the principal’s office. All except for me, that is. I was what you might call a “troublemaker,” ashamed beyond belief to be grouped with such good kids. Ever since I started school, I had been gripped by an inferiority complex and acting out was one way for me to punish myself. Smoking cigarettes in the bathrooms during break, ditching school to hang out at the billiards hall, sneaking out to the rooftop and jumping over the fence to fling scribbled letters to the female workers at the Ilshin Spinning Factory: I was that student. And yet, to think that I was a part of the literature club….
The atmosphere in the principal’s office was tense, like a string stretched to its breaking point. If it had been a routine transgression, they would have simply beaten us in front of the class and let that be the end of it, not summoned us all the way to the principal’s office like a band of criminals. We could tell just by looking at the faces of the adults gathered there—the principal, the vice principal, the art teacher, and the teacher in charge of the literature club.
I remember it was the vice principal who conducted the interrogation which ran something along the lines of “who was the ringleader, why did you plan something like this, who else helped you, how did you get the money,” but we couldn’t understand why we were being asked such questions in the first place. Why we had to endure shouts of “You bastards are killing me!” Why we had to just stand there and stomach it as we were slapped over and over again, our tender faces burning. All we had done was plan an exhibition of illustrated poems with our friends from literature clubs at other Gwangju high schools.
It was my first encounter with censorship. They confiscated the illustrations that our friends in the art class had diligently drawn over two months, and placed our poems on the literature teacher’s desk. She, who had always recited poetry to us with a dreamy voice, who had waxed lyrical about literature’s eternal fragrance, was no longer on our side. We couldn’t understand why we were suddenly her enemy, why she pelted us with angry, hateful words as the tears streamed down her face. The thought of getting her fired or somehow deceiving her had never even crossed our minds. We were mere high school kids who wavered, like most our age, between pessimism and slight romanticism; kids who didn’t even realize just how young we really were.
“What exactly does ‘blood’ mean here? Why did you write that the water of the ‘Gwangju River’ is scarlet? That you wanted to ‘grow a pair of wings and leave this earth’?”
The need for so many abstruse questions was beyond us, but we slowly came to a vague understanding of why we were there.
“Haven’t you kids heard of the Gwangju incident? ”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then why in the hell would you do something like this?”
In other words, it became apparent that our crime was not only ours, but that of our generation.
As a result of that “incident,” two of the students were suspended indefinitely—what essentially amounted to an expulsion—and the other two received lighter sentences. I occasionally saw one of the students after he returned from his suspension, but it always seemed like there was a shadow hanging over him, clinging to his body wherever he went. Eventually, he dropped out of school without a word as to why or where he was going. In the aftermath, the once-bright literature club faded away into obscurity, and though I periodically dropped by, I no longer felt the same sense of vitality from participating.
I felt sick all throughout summer, and the sickness lingered even into that long winter. Careening down a dangerous path in my continuous attempts to punish myself, I had found salvation in literature—the one space left that had allowed me to love myself. When that space was snatched from me with no plausible reason, I was flung out to the edge of a precipice, plunged into darkness. I didn’t know how to express any love for my life. I hadn’t yet realized that my fate was not innately determined, but constructed within social relations—that in order to change my fate, I would have to go beyond my own self and endeavor to change the structure of society.
A long time had to pass before I was able to rediscover the literature that I had lost. In that time, I had to undergo much more censorship and many more beatings, and meet the other wretched of the earth—to know the sadness and pain they embraced in their daily lives.
One by one, I gathered those wounds until they fused together and calcified, like stalagmites, to become a solid foundation for a language. The moment I believed I could now create “literature that is not literature,” I was compelled to start writing again. It was not that I had made a deliberate decision to become a poet, it was that words burst out of my eyes. Words poured out of my mouth. Words reached out from within me like a hand desperately grasping. This world transformed my body into a typewriter and started punching out its words, so that my body no longer belonged to me alone. It scored my flesh with its structures and wounds, so that this articulation of wounds became not my story, but ours.
I now know that there are other vibrant youth who, as I did back then, dream of poetry and music. I pray for them, that their literature will not be founded upon wounds.
“I can’t forget that laborer’s boarding house”
There was now a young man—barely older than a boy. His occupation: day laborer.
Without a single place underneath the Seoul sky to call his own, the young man was temporarily staying at a shabby boarding house in the Cheonggye district, hidden away in a back alley lined with hardware stores. When dawn eventually arrived, he would once again head out to the employment agency, once again desperately hope that his name would be called.
He had to get there by five in the morning: even ten minutes could mean the difference between securing a job for the day or going home empty-handed. Already at five, the cramped office was packed with weary bodies hugging backpacks to their chests. By six, all the jobs would have been assigned. Those lucky enough to be chosen received a scrap of paper and hurried out in groups of twos and threes. The work day started at seven sharp, and there was no time to waste.
On days he couldn’t find work, he could feel all the strength leaving his body. The weight of a body not even worthy of work, dragging him into a pit of self-hatred. On those days, the young man remained in bed all day and masturbated in the completely empty boarding house. Occasionally, blood would seep out from where the skin had started to peel.
Where to go? The blanket hadn’t been washed for several months, long before he got there. The pillowcase was filthy, the walls stained yellow with mold. But simply having a place to rest his body was a small relief. He could cope with the situation for at least a few months—if only he could find work.
There was another person sharing the room with him—just a few years older, but rarely seen without packets of pills. Unlike the others in the boarding house, the older man’s official occupation was not that of day laborer, but gambler. A kind of professional swindler. According to him, it was a necessary skill honed over the course of numerous hardships, including being orphaned at a young age. The employment agency had set up a small room and rented it out to drifting laborers like the young man. Every night, that bare space was transformed into a den for gambling and drinking. The older man snuck in every night and would return triumphantly with his winnings, never more than ten thousand won or so. He claimed that if you picked up too much at once, people would become wary. Whereas if everyone got a turn at winning, nobody would notice that they were being cheated.
But he still went out to work with the rest of them. He had to go at least twenty days out of the month, so that no one would get suspicious. One day, he sat the young man down against his protests and showed him some tricks. Ignoring the young man’s glares, he demonstrated the art of switching out cards, of picking out whichever one he wanted with the other players none the wiser. Despite his roommate’s insistence on gambling as a solid way to earn some pocket money, the young man adamantly refused to take part. He offered to take him along to his spot, told him he could easily earn tens of thousands of won in a single night, but the young man’s heart remained heavy and apathetic. It would be too pitiful, to scrounge money off those who were as poor as he was.
When the laborers’ money finally dried up, with not a single cent to be found in their pockets, his roommate went back to the countryside in search of new targets. Wads of bills lined the bottom of his bag. Yet he dragged out his departure, seeming sad to leave the young man. Surrounded by those who passed their days with alcohol, fights, and gambling, the young man must have stood out to him, forever reading books or scribbling in a notebook. He made a simple and earnest request: that the young man escape from here as quickly as possible, and become a writer.
***
Jobs generally meant construction work. Some days it was a public works project, other days carpentry or masonry, still others equipment repair. Whatever the job, he would have to carry around a knapsack, haul crates of heavy material, lug blocks of cement, and drag cables all over the city.
Only the dirtiest, most difficult jobs were left for the day laborers. At times, the young man felt like an ox or a horse. After a full day of work, shunting blocks of concrete without uttering a single word, he was left with a deep sadness—the feeling that he was not a human being, just an object valued for its ability to perform physical labor.
Workers weren’t even given a single pair of gloves. Some places provided food, but the majority forced workers to buy meals at their own expense. The hours that stretched until nine in the morning, when they were finally thrown their first morsel of food, were always the toughest. Exerting themselves on an empty stomach, their bodies would be shaking from the ends of their toes to their fingertips. Only after gulping down a warm bowl of ramyeon could the men feel some measure of strength return. What they really craved was some kimchi—the makeshift canteens on the construction sites would only ever toss them a few scraps of overly-salted pickled radish, but even that was a happiness. At smaller sites, they would generally have to make do with their ration of stale sponge cake and a carton of milk. Though the taste of the cool milk was not entirely unpleasant, the men felt light-headed at the prospect of making it to lunchtime on nothing else.
Hefting crates of sand and cement up and down flights of stairs did not feel like some ascetic practice of purification—more like an unbearable penance. Hauling bricks and construction supplies was the most draining work, repairing air duct systems in factories the most dangerous. Crawling between roof and ceiling, dangling dozens of meters above the ground, the young man could feel his heart constantly seizing up from fear.
In this way, the young man managed to scrape together 30,000 won for a full day’s labor. The meager sum would be further carved up—a full third went to commission fees for the employment agency, costs for gloves, food, transportation. At dusk, he would trudge back to the boarding house, wash up in the communal bathroom, and then leave in search of dinner. On jobless days, he made do with instant ramyeon, but when he worked, his body demanded nourishment.
Most often, he went to a bangyetang place. A shabby imitation of real samgyetang, the stew was made with just a quarter of an old, scrawny chicken. In order to recover from a day drenched in sweat, he required something heartier. He piled on the salt and pepper, generously added green onion, devoured all the side dishes. Only once he’d filled up on the free items did he polish off a bowl of stew, and only then did he start to feel like something approaching human again. From time to time, he bought soju by the glass, knocking back two or three in quick succession. Drinking invariably brought a gnawing melancholy that filled him with the urge to call someone, and he would pace by the pay phone for hours. But there was no one to call. In the lonely depths of night his journal kept him company, writing poems that he longed to send out into the world. The distance of an unreachable recipient always sliced his heart.
This kind of nomadic life continued for some time. When he was unable to find a boarding house, he would sneak into a construction site, spread out a Styrofoam mat, and sleep there—his only friend in the world was a bundle of clothes. But most often he took shelter in the makeshift canteens that sprung up around the sites. If he was lucky, there would be a container shed, or at least some kind of shack, shoddily pieced together from leftover wooden planks. If he was luckier still, he would meet kindhearted people who shared their own temporary rooms with him.
Two years of this rootless life passed until he was just about able to get a place of his own. The security deposit was 500,000 won, the monthly rent 80,000. Despite returning home when it was already pitch-black, he would keep his eyes squeezed shut as he fumbled around for the light switch, then waited for the swarms of cockroaches and winged insects to retreat to their hiding places. He waited to avoid catching a glimpse of the enormous rats that would crawl out from the drains. Finally, he’d left behind the boarding houses, the construction sites shared with strangers, and now had a room all to himself. There, he began recording the lives of those who had been trampled on, in poetry and prose; depicting the small hope of a life and society where everyone could be happy.
***
The years passed and in time, the young man became middle-aged. Now with an adorable child and a kind-hearted wife, he leased a small, poorly-lit, but still cozy room.
He also became a poet, just as he had dreamed. His work was published, if not to wide acclaim. Occasionally, he would even be addressed using the honorific “Seonsaengnim.” His bag of tools was eventually replaced by a neat book bag.
The middle-aged man continues to record that period in his life. How are you doing? Do you still stop by that boarding house? Is everyone from back then doing well? Has your tuberculosis gotten better? When can we meet again?
Of course, the letters never reach those for whom they are intended. The young man’s friends are still people without a fixed address—poor day laborers or homeless. Though he continues to write hundreds of letters to them, they are never really delivered. His readers are completely different people, living completely different lives. Every time, this failure in communication makes the young man, the middle-aged man, despondent. Will he always have to write such letters, even in old age?
In moments of uncertainty, the middle-aged man casts his mind back to that time—painful, bitter, and filled with suffering, yet at no other point had he ever dreamed so desperately, so fully of liberation.
I
Still
Can’t forget that laborers’ boarding house.
