December 20, 1944
Yongdong County, Korea
The newlyweds threaded their way slowly through the bare and twisting winter valleys, their little cortege heading home beneath jumbled ridges and peaks a traveler once likened to the sight of the sea in a gale.
The crew-cut young man, Chung Eun-yong, small and intense, his slight build buttoned up in a stern high-necked jacket, sat hunched inside a closed sedan chair at the head of the humble procession. Slung between two poles, he was an easy morning’s work for the two bearers loping along front and rear.
The bride, Park Sun-yong, some paces behind, sat atop a bouncing rickshaw whose runner swung left and right in hopes of dodging the road’s ripples and rocks. She was a gentle, big-eyed young woman, and she was on a short, seven-mile journey of a lifetime, the trip to her new village. She was petrified.
New husband Eun-yong, twenty-one years old, had much on his mind: How would his parents take to his bride? Would she soon bear him a son? Would she make a good wife for a policeman? For that matter, would he make a success of himself?
His eighteen-year-old wife wondered the same things. But now, with the cold December air pricking her plump pink cheeks, Sun-yong also had the warm memory of yesterday’s wedding to draw upon. The weather, it was true, had forced them to wear a layer of everyday clothes beneath the brilliant colors of their wedding costumes. A winter wedding is unusual in Korea. But they had their reasons for not waiting, and things went perfectly in the minutely choreographed ceremony on the matang, the foreyard of her parents’ house in the village of Shimchon. Now they were traveling, in the traditional homecoming, from Shimchon to the young Mr. Chung’s ancestral village, Chu Gok.
Behind the couple and their hired conveyances, porters leaned into the road carrying her luggage on their ji-gae, the wooden back frames, shaped like the letter A, that Korean men used to transport everything from rice sheaves to frail grandmothers. Along with Sun-yong’s clothes and household items, they bore gifts of clothing and food for Eun-yong’s family.
Yongdong County’s gray-brown slopes, much of their tree cover stripped for firewood, seemed lifeless, except for the black-and-white magpies and the rare pheasant or hare that might startle from the scrub. The roads themselves always teemed with Korean life in winter, especially on this highway of packed earth and gravel that for centuries had served as the peninsula’s main north-south route, meandering diagonally through the jigsaw of valleys and up and down passes, from the old royal capital at Seoul, 100 miles northwest of Yongdong town, to the ancient seaport of Pusan, the same distance to the southeast.
On the road to Yongdong, oxen snorted frozen clouds of breath as they hauled their carts of bagged rice. Sturdy men in flimsy sandals, with weathered faces and calloused hands, strode along under loads of firewood. Women passed with bulging cotton bags atop their heads. All were dressed in the usual winter garb of quilted and padded white cotton. Even in ancient times the Koreans were known to the Chinese and others as the “people in white.”
Like China, Korea in the mid–twentieth century remained a land of villages in a maze of terraced valleys. They stretched in chains along the roads or reached into tight, steep side hollows, each village, or ri, a cluster of thatched roofs of graying yellow, ringed by fields wet and green with rice in the summer, and where barley was now taking root for the winter.
The smell of wood smoke met travelers along the road. Beneath the chimneys, inside the mud-walled homes, villagers worked at sorting rice straw for weaving or other wintertime chores, or readied some red bean porridge for the winter solstice meal, the holiday dish that, tradition said, warded off ghosts on the year’s longest night.
Steam whistles, at regular intervals, pierced the mountain stillness. The peninsula’s main rail line paralleled the road, and the Japanese, Korea’s colonial masters since annexing the country in 1910, were running trainloads of war matériel northward from ships at Pusan, to their hundreds of thousands of troops in Manchuria and at the fighting fronts of China. After crossing a tiny trestle at nearby No Gun Ri, the trains rumbled on another five minutes and past Eun-yong’s home village. The punctual sound of hissing locomotives told Chu Gok Ri residents the time of day.
By late 1944, the global war had reached into Chu Gok and each of Korea’s 29,043 other villages. Local Japanese administrators were demanding more and more rice to feed the troops and the Japanese home front. The colonial government and other landlords who once took half the rice crop now were seizing up to 70 percent. And the Japanese took more than food. They dug up Seoul’s water mains for their iron and even seized gongs from little village bands for their brass, and they impressed many thousands of young Koreans into hard labor at mines and factories in Japan, and some into Imperial Army service at the warfront. Young men from Chu Gok Ri were among them, and some never returned.
It was a difficult, hungry time for Koreans, but the latest bad news for Japan—despite censorship, people heard of American victories in the Philippines—secretly cheered some in Chu Gok Ri.
For now, the war meant shortage and hardship, even for a wedding. The bridegroom was supposed to ride a horse royally from the wedding back to his home, but the horses had gone to war and Eun-yong had to settle for a rented sedan chair. The bride’s neighbors would normally receive an invitation to a feast of wine and song, but Sun-yong’s family had to limit the celebration to a handful of relatives.
The two had been brought together in the usual way, by family arrangement. Village grapevines had told the parents that each was eligible. A female go-between checked each family’s wealth and standing. The prospective bride’s father was relatively well-to-do, a low-ranking township official with money and land. Eun-yong, as a policeman, was a good catch. Eun-yong knew the arranged marriage had to be, but he got one modern concession: He could see the girl before agreeing to marry her.
That day, accompanied by a male cousin for a second opinion, the young man first met Sun-yong’s father, honoring him with a formal bow, kneeling, nose almost to the floor. Then he was led to a small room where the girl waited in a pink hanbok, the high-waisted Korean gown.
“She was beautiful,” Eun-yong said. “We didn’t talk at all, and someone brought in jujube fruit and dried persimmon. I may have eaten one or two. Then they said it was time to go.” The minutes flew for Sun-yong, too. “Not bad,” she thought of this stranger with the small, serious face.
On the appointed wedding day, a date chosen by a fortune-teller, it dawned snowy, not a deep snow but enough for the cows to leave hoofprints. Sun-yong’s family spread a rice straw mat in the center of the matang, and placed a table on it laden with the Korean symbols of matrimony: a live hen and cock bound in cloth, rice cakes, fruits, candles, alternating red and blue colors representing the bride and groom.
Now she stood before him across the wedding table, hair pulled up into a tight bun, face thickly powdered, a bright red dot placed on each cheek. Her coat and skirt were a rainbow of primary colors. He wore the costume of a court official—red, black and blue. They performed the solemn rituals—delicately timed bows, precise postures for sitting and facing each other, she always with head bowed, never talking or smiling, because a smile, it was said, would doom her to bear only girls, a dreadful prospect in a society that tells a wife her sacred duty is to carry on the male family line.
They sealed their marriage with a hapkunlye, a ceremonial sharing of cups of wine. She then retired to her room. He then ate a meal alone, and after sunset joined her. By age-old custom, women of the family gathered outside, to learn what would happen. Inside, according to script, he would blow out the candle, and the eaves-droppers outside were obliged to retreat, with giggles or grumbles.
As a policeman, Chung Eun-yong was exempt from Japan’s draft. Having a family would insulate him still further. But the union was even more important to the Parks. Japanese police had been taking away young unmarried Koreans to become “comfort women”—a euphemism for sex slaves, working in front-line military brothels. The roundups that began in southernmost Korea were now rumored to be moving toward the Yongdong area. To Sun-yong, then, this sober young man was not just a husband. He was a savior.
The war was far from their homes, but still it cut deep into Korean souls, just as wars on their doorsteps—wars always brought to them by others—had done in centuries past. One scar from a long-ago war lay just over the hills the newlyweds skirted as they made their way, the day after the wedding, toward Chu Gok Ri. The women of Yul village had fled into those hills three and a half centuries earlier as a huge Japanese army poured up the main road, slaughtering and pillaging along the way. Two village women, pursued by invaders, threw themselves to their deaths from a cliff rather than be raped and killed by the foreign soldiers. The people of Yongdong County have since memorialized the place as the “Hill of the Japanese Barbarians.”
* * *
Koreans had long sought to be left alone in their “Hermit kingdom.” In the end, when their walls crumbled in the nineteenth century and they could no longer keep out the world, they were the last East Asian nation to open up to Western trade and ideas.
Their rugged, sharp-peaked peninsula, the size of Great Britain, juts out 500 miles into natural trade routes of northeast Asia, putting Korea at a crossroads among larger nations. Yongdong, meanwhile, was a crossroads of southern Korea. Through its valleys, hemmed in by highlands reaching to 3,000 feet, Korean tribes and kingdoms contacted and fought each other. Twentieth-century boys playing “knights” and scaling the heights near Yongdong could still find the ruins of stone bastions, remains of forgotten wars. One giant battlement circled the summit of White Horse Mountain, looming across the main road from Chu Gok Ri.
Around A.D. 935 the kingdoms were united under the Koryo dynasty. Since then, although outside powers had brought war to the land, Koreans themselves had lived at peace with one another.
The 200,000-man Japanese army that terrorized Korea in the late 1500s, driving the women of Yul off the cliffs, was dispatched by the shogun Hideyoshi, who wanted Korea as a stepping-stone to the conquest of China. In thousands of boats, the invaders plowed through the waves of the Korea Strait to Pusan and marched north toward Seoul, the capital. Unprepared, with outdated weapons, a “Righteous Army” of Korean peasants held off the invaders for three days east of Yongdong, at Autumn Wind Pass, until the Japanese broke through and flooded the area, plundering and burning, raping and killing thousands before moving on to Seoul. Surviving peasants pulled back into the forested mountain valleys to carry on a guerrilla resistance. It is believed that Chu Gok Ri’s more isolated sister village, Im Ke Ri, arose during this period.
Harassed by guerrillas, strangled at sea by the Koreans’ revolutionary ironclad “turtle” boats, facing a Chinese army marching down from the north, the overextended Japanese pulled back after seven years to a perimeter in the southeast. Hideyoshi’s generals ordered a scorched-earth campaign and burned down Kyongju, an ancient Korean capital, and then finally left the peninsula. The Koreans soon disentangled themselves from the Chinese and withdrew into centuries of isolation.
The Korean people absorbed and refined the cultures of others. Confucianism, the Chinese creed of devotion to ancestors and family, arrived around the fourth century, most scholars believe, and was still the village religion of Koreans sixteen centuries later. It had a heavy overlay of Buddhism, the religion of contentment through self-denial, which came to the peninsula about the same time and was eventually passed on to Japan as a Korean product.
The Koreans’ own prehistoric shamanism also survived in the hearts of villagers, like those of Chu Gok Ri. This was a set of unorganized beliefs in a host of spirits that must be respected and appeased—spirits of the household, in old trees and great rocks, of the dead. A shaman, a village woman known as a mutang, could be called on to deal with the spirits and cure ailments.
At the same time, Koreans could be modernizers. They developed movable type long before Gutenberg. They devised their own simple alphabet, freeing Korea from the shackles of Chinese character-writing. They taught techniques of ceramic making to the Japanese. They instituted civil service exams and organized the nation into political subdivisions centuries before Western societies did.
Down the centuries, however, the people were kept in serflike poverty. An elite called the yangban owned the land, and masses of simple farmers labored endlessly to pay them rent with their rice crop. The Yongdong area, picturesque and peaceful, became the home of yangban with positions in the royal government in Seoul. This semifeudal society, which also included a small population of Korean slaves, largely survived until the late nineteenth century, when an outside world intrigued by tales of gold, of “pagans” needing God, or simply of new commercial frontiers, grew ever bolder—and sometimes violent—with the Koreans.
In 1866, the General Sherman, an armed, U.S.-owned ship carrying a Chinese crew and a few Americans seeking to open Korea, defied warnings and steamed up the Taedong River to the city of Pyongyang. Korean accounts say the crew went ashore and looted, and the ship exchanged fire with Koreans on shore. An armed standoff ended when the General Sherman grounded in shallows, and the Koreans killed all nineteen on board. In response, a U.S. Navy squadron later appeared off Korea’s west coast. It, too, was fired upon, but it managed to land Marines on Kanghwa Island, where they killed hundreds of Korean defenders before withdrawing. It was the Koreans’ first encounter with the American military.
Korea’s five-century-old Yi dynasty came under growing pressure from many sides, and by the 1880s had signed treaties allowing trade with Western powers and Japan, even opening the land to Christian missionaries. From that time, Korea simply became a piece in the chess game of great powers, none of whom wanted a rival to dominate the strategically situated peninsula. Soon Japan was checkmating the others, defeating China and then Russia in wars in 1895 and 1905. The United States then negotiated a secret agreement with Tokyo recognizing Japan’s “suzerainty” over Korea in return for a Japanese pledge not to interfere with U.S. interests in the Philippines. In 1910, Japan finally forced Korea’s weak Yi regime to cede power to direct Japanese colonial rule. America and Britain, whose bankers helped finance Japan’s expansion, ignored the appeals of Korean patriots for support—something Koreans never forgot.
* * *
The Japanese wanted more than a colony; they wanted to make Koreans an integral part of a greater Japan, to the point of replacing their language with Japanese and forcing them to adopt Japanese names. In Chu Gok Ri, young Chung Eun-yong had to take the name Ingyo Matsukawa. The emperor’s hand would endow Korea with the “the gift of good administration and peace,” the first colonial governor-general wrote.
The Koreans showed they didn’t want the emperor’s gifts, or to give up their language or their right to speak their minds and work out their own affairs. From 1905 to 1915, armed with antiquated weapons and fighting from the hills, Koreans resisted Japanese power. They called themselves the Righteous Army. The Japanese called them bandits and rooted them out. When nationalist demonstrations filled the streets of Seoul and other cities in 1919, the Japanese brutally crushed them. It was the era when President Woodrow Wilson was championing “self-determination” for nationalities, but Korean nationalists, like those in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia and Africa, found little help in America for their anticolonial cause.
Seven men from Chu Gok Ri were leaders of the “March 1 Protests” in 1919 in Yongdong County, distinguishing their little village as a home of patriots. One, Chung Hee-yong, was taken away by the Japanese police, interrogated and beaten nearly to death. He was found semiconscious on a street in Yongdong town by Chung Tae-nyon, the bridegroom Eun-yong’s father, who carried him home on his back. Chung Hee-yong lived as a fugitive for years afterward, and anti-Japanese sentiment among Chu Gok villagers intensified.
The new colonialists saw Korea as a rice bowl for the homeland. A Japanese monopoly land corporation expropriated public lands and pressured private owners into selling. Tens of thousands of Japanese emigrated to the new farming frontier. In some fertile areas, more than two-thirds of the land came under Japanese ownership. Remaining Korean landlords worked with the “New Order.”
The Japanese industrialized the underdeveloped economy to some extent, particularly in the north, building hydroelectric plants, harvesting the vast forests. They laid the rail line that cut through Autumn Wind Pass and ran by No Gun Ri and Chu Gok Ri and on to Seoul. The foreigners went prospecting, too, even around Chu Gok Ri, digging small gold mines in the mountainside behind Im Ke Ri and forcing some of the valley’s poor to work there.
The new masters had some good ideas. In a country where only twenty thousand children were being educated in 1910, almost a million were in school a generation later. But Korean children were taught only in Japanese, and Korean newborns had to be registered with Japanese names.
The Japanese brought modern farming techniques to the rice paddies, boosting yields, but demands for rents and taxes—rice or money—grew onerous, to the point of extortion and near-starvation. Per-capita consumption of rice, the Korean staple, dropped almost 50 percent between 1915 and 1938, as harvests were sent to Japan by the shipload. Overall calorie intake fell with it, in a farming nation whose peasants, if impoverished, at least had eaten adequately in the past. The demands of World War II, when livestock was being seized and the rice tax grew, pushed villagers even closer to starvation. With the harvest, police descended on Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri and searched the nooks and crannies of households for hidden rice. When any was found, responsible villagers would be flogged or jailed.
Ambitious young men like the newlywed Eun-yong found the Japanese hand oppressive in other ways, too. Eun-yong was a bright child in a proud line of Chungs that included noted Yi dynasty scholars, but his village-poor family could never afford a real education for him. From middle school, he won admission to the prestigious, costly Kyongsung technical school in Seoul. He had dreams of becoming an architect. Instead he went off to the one-year railroad school in the capital, a free government institution. Home on a vacation, he received a letter from the Kyongsung principal telling him they would extend their enrollment deadline especially for him. The teenager crumpled the letter, threw it into the kitchen fireplace and wept.
Once out of school, Eun-yong worked on the telegraph at Seoul’s Yongsan railroad station, relaying messages of military shipments and imminent U.S. air attacks on Japanese targets. Outnumbered by Japanese coworkers, ground down by anti-Korean discrimination, he got into a fistfight with a Japanese coworker and eventually quit.
In 1944, the war was going badly for Japan, and Eun-yong knew he would be seized and thrown into the Imperial Army. But he managed to join the police force and now had married Sun-yong. A few days after the wedding, they left for his assignment in Taejon, a bustling city 25 miles north of Chu Gok Ri.
Like all Chu Gok Ri travelers, the young couple passed the Sonangdang at the village’s entrance, a gnarled old tree and imposing six-foot-tall rock where the village “guardian spirit” dwelled. Some still placed a small stone there, a prayer to the Sonang for a safe journey home, as they ventured out into the uncertain world.
* * *
Chu Gok Ri, fronting the main road and the railroad beyond, lay at the mouth of a side valley that reached back to where sister village Im Ke Ri sat in a cul-de-sac below the 2,500-foot-high backdrop of Three Peaks Mountain. From above, as graceful white herons flew in each spring, the little valley was a patchwork of rice paddies and vegetable gardens edging right up to the farmers’ rice-thatch roofs.
The villages were a collection of extended families, totaling about 570 people in Chu Gok Ri and 390 in Im Ke Ri in the late 1940s. The Chung, Yang and Suh clans were dominant, networks of brothers and cousins—up to eight degrees of separation were carefully tracked—that supplied the social underpinning, the support system, that allowed a village to stand almost independently. Whatever the upheavals nationally, whatever local officials might be appointed from outside, the village stayed essentially democratic, led by a consensus of elders and clan chiefs. This gave villagers a sense of unity and security in a world of tax collectors and police.
The elders were the men in black hats—the distinctively Korean horsetail-hair got, a six-inch-high crown ringed by a wide flat brim, worn by married men with recognized social standing. If of yangban descent, the Chu Gok Ri elder might also be distinguished in his speech, his words few but important, delivered in a leisurely regional drawl.
The “people in white” wore natural-colored clothing, in the warm months usually made of coarse hemp, sometimes cotton—pajama-style with baggy pants for men, and high-waisted, ankle-length skirts and a light jacket top for women. Some middle-aged women bared their midriffs to the bottom of their breasts, and some removed their tops on the hottest days working the fields. On the rainiest days, villagers donned wide bamboo hats and rice-straw capes. Almost all wore homemade, high-slung sandals of rice straw, which hard use could wear out in a day. The children went shoeless in summer and usually tramped through winter’s mud and snow on wooden clogs. Many children could be seen running down village lanes in oversized clothes, hand-me-downs from older brothers and sisters.
Confucianism put a patriarchal stamp on the Korean family. The elder in his mud-and-straw house was “king in his castle,” sometimes aloof to an extreme. Because of women’s presumed inferiority, some husbands conversed with wives only when necessary. Past the age of seven, except for close family, the sexes did not mix.
The elder got the best food and was served first, sitting cross-legged on the floor at his individual dining tray. Younger males followed, and then the women and children. A better-off village family might eat potatoes or sweet potatoes mixed with rice, and some kimchi, the Korean trademark dish of pickled cabbage or radish. The food came from an earth-floor kitchen at the left end of the rectangular Chu Gok Ri house. The oven’s smoke drifted out a chimney at the house’s opposite end, having first warmed the flues under the one or two tiny bedrooms on the right, where the family rolled out quilts to retire each night atop a clay floor layered with rice-straw mats. Before each home, inside an outer fence of mud and stone, was its dusty matang, where mats were laid so an elder could lounge or rice could dry. Inside the fence, a hog, chickens, perhaps a beehive were kept. If a family was rich it had an ox and wooden-wheeled cart.
Putting down their chopsticks at dinner’s end, the villagers returned to their endless chores, often making rope or bags or sandals from rice straw. Rice was everything, and the government exacted a quota of straw products from villagers as a tax. The light went out early to save kerosene, and the sounds of the night took over in Chu Gok Ri—bamboo rattling in the breeze, a sick cow lowing, a hungry baby crying, a widow’s muted sobs. The children dropped off to the rhythmic tock, tock, tock of mother and daughter-in-law, before a rounded stone, pounding wrinkles out of the freshly laundered family clothes with wooden ironing bats.
Children were everywhere. Most of the village’s population was under twenty. Many died young of tuberculosis, measles, typhoid, smallpox—almost half didn’t make it to age six. More were conceived to ensure the family’s future. Midcentury Korea had one of the world’s highest population growth rates, and new generations would find little available farmland around Yongdong. In Chu Gok Ri, only a half-dozen families owned any land; the rest rented, mostly from absentee landlords. To many parents, education was the children’s way out of the narrow valleys.
The Japanese opened a school less than a mile from Chu Gok Ri in 1942, a marvel of wood, with wooden floors that the children would sweep and wipe in the morning before sitting down to learn. Before that, those going to school had to trek almost two hours to Yongdong, or get only classical Confucian training from a village sage at the Seodang, the “House of Letters.”
Not every child attended the new school. To Yang Ho-yong and his wife, their Hae-sook was “Kum Yi,” Golden Girl. Born in 1937, she was an energetic, talkative child, the only daughter in a family from a yangban line that had descended into poverty as small rice farmers. She stood out among her friends, a head taller, as they jumped rope to singsong or played kongki, a marbles-like game with pebbles. But when they set off with their books each morning for school, Hae-sook didn’t join them. Her parents were old-fashioned: they didn’t believe girls should be educated.
In a cramped, century-old house in Im Ke Ri, with a little bent pear tree out front, seven of them lived: grandmother, parents, eldest son Hae-young, middle boy Hae-chan, a baby brother and the “golden” daughter.
Hae-chan ranged the mountain slopes around Im Ke Ri with other boys, climbing trees for wild chestnuts, setting snares for rabbits. They caught crayfish in the stream, and in the winter, when it froze, they would find a piece of wood and push themselves on this “sled” all the way down to Chu Gok Ri. Small for his age, Hae-chan was beaten up once by the village bully. Instead of running off, he stood outside the boy’s house, yelling for him to come out again, until the father finally did and apologized. “My brother was a small kid and weak, but he had a lot of guts,” Hae-sook said. It was an inner strength that would be tested sooner, and more cruelly, than any ten-year-old deserved.
Yongdong, three miles to the west, was the outer limit of most village children’s lives. They might accompany adults to the open-air market, held every five days, and see an itinerant clown or musicians clad in traditional yellow, blue and red. The routine distractions were nonstop: the noise of townspeople and travelers; gossips from other villages; men driving cattle, women with barrels on their heads and babies on their backs; mutangs interpreting dreams; rich landlords’ sons pedaling their own bicycles; haughty Japanese surveying the natives from rickshaws.
Back in the village, however, life for these midcentury Koreans remained a daily struggle, one that led each year to a climb up “the hill of barley,” the grim season of late winter and early spring when the autumn harvest’s reserves of rice and other food ran out, and families survived day to day, hand to mouth, until they could bring in the winter barley.
During those gray days, they climbed the hills around them, collecting firewood to sell in Yongdong. Year by year, they ascended higher, deeper into the mountains as the slopes lost more cover to their little iron axes. It was exhausting work. The villagers felled pine or scrub oak, laboriously chopped it up into firewood, and then descended the rugged mountainsides with their back A-frames piled high with heavy loads. They would stop at the village for lunch, then push on to Yongdong, returning as the sun dipped behind the mountains, with a little barley, the food of poverty, to last them another day.
Although the Japanese distributed rations of rotting “bean cake,” barely edible pulp left after oil was squeezed from soybeans, the villagers had to resort to eating roots and grass in the hardest times. The children grew famished; their ribs stuck out; white spots spread on their faces. They dug into hillsides for starchy arrowroot, which turned their mouths chocolate-brown. When pink azaleas covered the mountain meadows, the children would eat the flowers. They hunted down snakes and frogs to roast. Their mothers made noodles or buns from roots, sprouts and grain husks to fill their stomachs, giving them digestive problems, bloated bellies and little nutrition.
During these worst of times for the people of Chu Gok Ri, a tall schoolboy from the Chung clan, Chung Koo-hun, was approaching his teens and seeing the injustice of the world around him. Toting his baby brother, Koo-hak, around the village, Koo-hun found that neighbors agreed. “I can tell you that many people back then dreamed of some miracle, some revolution to happen,” Koo-hun said. “After years of living under extortion, they wanted a change in the world.”
But for now, the people of Chu Gok Ri had only each other to lean on, and their ancestors. Those departed generations remained close by in spirit, guardians whose eternal happiness would, in turn, bestow good fortune on the families left behind. The devotion took its most ceremonial form at New Year’s, when ancestral tablets, small plaques of polished chestnut, were displayed in the house and meals were symbolically shared with deceased parents and grandparents. On the most important holiday, autumn’s Chusok harvest moon, villagers climbed to family burial mounds on the hillsides overlooking the valley, trimmed the grass and made offerings of new rice to those who gave them life.
In recent decades, some around Yongdong had found another place of solace as well—in Christianity. The Salvation Army had established a small mission in Chu Gok Ri in 1915. In its 1934 yearbook, the organization boasted of Korea, “There have been many striking instances of conversion from devil worship.” American missionaries may have shown little respect for the Koreans’ religious traditions, but some villagers nonetheless found the church novel and exciting—the singing, the camaraderie at services, the reassuring promise of a better life in the hereafter. Americans in uniform, church “captains” and “majors” waging religious “warfare,” traveled the countryside. The Salvation Army even built a small modern hospital in the town of Yongdong.
But these American “soldiers” were expelled by the Japanese in 1941 and the congregation languished. Then, on August 15, 1945, word reached the villages that Japan had surrendered to end World War II, and three weeks later a genuine American army, the war’s victors, landed on the peninsula to take the surrender of Japanese troops in southern Korea, while the Soviet army did the same in the north.
* * *
On the matangs of 29,000 villages up and down the Korean peninsula, millions sensed a gate was opening to a bright future. Liberated from Japanese rule, they danced in the streets of Seoul.
“I thought, I can have a real Korean education,” Koo-hun said of the time when Japanese teachers had to pack up and leave for their homeland. “And I could have pride. I could learn that Korean people could actually be better than Japanese people.” Ordinary Korean families were filled with expectation and hope in those early days. But within months the future of their reborn country suddenly looked less promising, and less their own to decide, than it did on Liberation Day.
Korea’s fate, they learned, had been determined by men half a world away in a sterile Washington office. Officers on the Army General Staff in Washington, pressed by deadlines, meeting past midnight on the morning of August 11, 1945, had arbitrarily chosen the latitude of 38 degrees north, a parallel running north of Seoul, to separate U.S. and Soviet zones for the purpose of demobilizing the Japanese. The line, accepted by the Soviets, had no intrinsic sense. It sundered the dependent halves of the Korean economy, the more industrial north, with its 10 million people, from the more agricultural south, population 20 million. The line’s only advantage was that it was easy to find on the crude map the major and colonel had available in that distant Washington office.
The 38th Parallel, meant as a line of convenience for two armies’ temporary operations, immediately took on characteristics of a political boundary, infuriating the divided people. Just two weeks after his troops landed in Korea on September 8, the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, sent a message to General MacArthur in Tokyo: “Dissatisfaction with the division of the country grows.”
Hodge had received no detailed guidelines from Washington for the operation, and his relations with his hosts got off to a bad start. Even before reaching Korea, he had instructed his officers to view the Koreans as an enemy. When his 78,000 troops began landing, he ordered Japanese police to keep local welcoming crowds away. The police shot and killed two Koreans in the process.
Hodge, a combat commander with no preparation for this job, alienated Koreans further by taking his time removing the Japanese colonial governor-general. A temporary assembly of prominent Koreans, mostly moderates to leftists, had declared a republic two days before the Americans arrived, but Hodge would not recognize it. He soon banned such activity, and in November 1945 shut down a Seoul newspaper sympathetic to the republic.
Officers of a new U.S. Army Military Government in Korea took over the administrative functions in Seoul. The Koreans quickly saw they were not being liberated, but occupied, just like defeated Japan. In December 1945, the victorious Allies agreed in Moscow they would exercise a five-year “trusteeship” leading to a united, sovereign Korea. Word of this further delay in independence set off work stoppages and street demonstrations in Seoul.
The American officers had limited scope. Not very international-minded to begin with, knowing little about Korea, they relied on a relatively few Koreans who spoke English, often politically conservative men who had ties to Christian missions and who reinforced the Americans’ inclination to the right. Koreans sneered at it as the “interpreters’ government.” In the streets, a song spread among children: “Don’t believe Americans! Don’t be cheated by Soviets! The Japanese will rise again!”
In February 1946, Hodge established a Representative Democratic Council of Koreans as an advisory group, and named as chairman a seventy-year-old right-wing Christian, Syngman Rhee, who had spent years as an exile in the United States campaigning for Korean independence. More liberal groups, all but excluded, refused to cooperate with the council, and it withered.
In the fall of 1946, the U.S. military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing “strong-arm methods” had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism and only 14 percent capitalism. Generations of subservience to a Korean or Japanese elite had whetted the appetite for egalitarianism.
“They were not ‘communist sympathizers.’ They were simply against the pro-Japanese forces,” Chung Koo-hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers’ attitude. “The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated.”
In the national police and other sensitive areas, the U.S. military often relied on Koreans who had collaborated with the colonial regime. Continuity seemed to come first for the Americans as they asserted control over a strange land 9,000 miles from home. Seventy of 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.
Hodge’s soldiers began to feel a Yankee-go-home hostility. In some areas, they carried carbine rifles on the briefest errands, and they vented their dislike and incomprehension of the impoverished millions around them with the harsh “gook,” the slur picked up a half-century earlier in the Philippines. Its use may have grown because of the similarity in sound to han guk sa ram, the Korean word for “Korean.” Even high staff officers used the epithet freely, and in an official document Hodge referred to Koreans as “muddle-headed.”
The Soviets, who shared a short border with Korea, had it easier in the north. Behind the Red Army came thousands of Koreans who had lived in exile or as economic migrants in the Soviet Far East, or had fought with China’s revolutionaries. Many were communists. These returnees, along with political prisoners freed in Korea as Japanese rule collapsed, took over local “people’s committees,” originally established as “committees of law and order” by the temporary government Hodge had outlawed in the south. Peasants and industrial workers filled out committee ranks.
The Soviets never established a full-fledged military government in the north, moving quickly to local control. Political parties sprang up, but the Korean communists, well organized and highly motivated, maneuvered all into a united New People’s Party in early 1946. Suppression of the opposition press then followed, and Kim Il Sung, a leader of anti-Japanese guerrillas in neighboring Manchuria, took charge of a central Provisional People’s Committee in the north’s largest city, Pyongyang, the old Koryo dynasty capital.
The transition in the north was tumultuous. The new regime not only seized Japanese-held farmland for redistribution, but also evicted Korean landlords from any but small plots they cultivated themselves. Many wealthier northerners, especially those with Japanese connections, had fled south at the first approach of the Soviet army. Now still more landlords joined the exodus, along with thousands of other northerners driven south by food shortages.
Such political thresholds were crossed in 1946—both north and south—because the Americans and Soviets failed to work out a formula for establishing a united, independent Korea. Their own concerns, back in Washington and Moscow, outweighed the commitment made to the Korean people under the Moscow accord. The Russians, as they had since the nineteenth century, sought a Korea on their border that was friendly, or at least neutral, and not a launchpad for anti-Soviet activities. The Americans, whose global confidence had been bolstered by the atomic bomb, began to view Korea, a land that had meant almost nothing to them, in a new light, as an “ideological battle ground upon which our entire success in Asia may depend,” as adviser Edwin Pauley put it to President Harry S. Truman in mid-1946.
At joint meetings in early 1946, the two powers were to set up negotiations for a unified Korean state. But the Americans tried to freeze southern leftists out of the process, and the Soviets wanted to exclude Rhee’s far right, because it opposed trusteeship and Moscow’s role. The talks collapsed and Korea’s division solidified. Pauley, a California oilman and Democratic fund-raiser who had toured the peninsula, told Truman that in Korea communism “could get off to a better start than practically anywhere.”
By whatever name, something was starting in the southern Korean countryside. The leftist National Farmers’ Committee, favoring land redistribution, worked hard to reach into even the smallest villages. When the southern Korean police began arresting young village men indiscriminately for real or imagined interest in the farmers’ group, its membership rose sharply, as peasants reacted against the heavy-handed, Japanese-style tactics.
The U.S. military government had pleased the farmers by decreeing a limit on the “rice rent” of 30 percent of the crop. That was on paper. In reality, enforcement was lax, landlords still gouged tenant farmers and the military government did actual harm with a related ordinance lifting price controls and imposing a “free market” on rice. That set off a binge of speculation, corruption and smuggling of Korean rice abroad, which left subsistence rice farmers and other poor southerners with little to eat. They exploded with resentment.
In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policemen, and the U.S. military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.
The division at the 38th Parallel sharpened along with resentments in the countryside. In August 1948, with U.S. approval, South Korea declared itself a separate republic. The north followed suit. Each claimed jurisdiction over the whole peninsula. Soviet troops withdrew from the peninsula by late 1948, and American units a few months later. The military leaderships of both great powers feared becoming ensnared in the Korean web.
American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood, spending much of 1947 in a village west of Seoul, watched as police carried young men off to jail by the truckload. A “mantle of fear” had fallen over once-peaceful valleys, he wrote. The word “communist,” he said, “seemed to mean just ‘any young man of a village.’” On August 7, 1947, the U.S. military government outlawed the southern communists, the Korean Workers’ Party. Denied a peaceful political route, more and more leftist militants chose an armed struggle for power.
Police officers lived in fear, too. Chung Eun-yong, now a police lieutenant, was ordered from the relative quiet of Taejon in the fall of 1948 to the southern island of Cheju, where serious trouble had broken out. He worried about himself and about his family: Sun-yong had borne him two children, the first a boy, whom they named Koo-pil, and just recently a baby girl, Koo-hee. The young mother worried, too, lonely in their roomy Taejon home, a “tatami house” left by the Japanese. Persuaded by a local Presbyterian deacon, she tried religion, every Sunday carrying two-year-old Koo-pil and the newborn to church to pray for Eun-yong’s safety.
Her husband landed on lush Cheju on October 1, 1948, at the head of a police squadron. Within a week, two of his men lay dead, killed by leftist guerrillas who attacked his station at night. Rhee, now president of South Korea, had ordered his embryonic army to crush the island revolt. Villagers were driven from their homes with a few pitiful belongings, and soldiers then set the thatched roofs ablaze. Thousands of islanders were killed in the campaign.
One South Korean army regiment mutinied in protest of the tactics, briefly seizing the southern city of Yeosoo, and another rebelled in Taegu. The rebels were suppressed by forces loyal to Rhee, advised by U.S. officers, but some managed to flee into the mountains to become guerrillas.
All across the south, insurgent bands were recruiting young men, often transient farm workers and others of the lowest social classes. As in thousands of other villages, the great majority of people in Chu Gok Ri were not political. Villagers later recalled, however, that one well-to-do family had been closely allied with the Japanese colonial regime and then with Rhee’s police, and that on the other side three young villagers left to take up arms with the guerrillas. One of the three was eventually shot to death by police, another was arrested and a third disappeared. Two other Chu Gok Ri youths—Sohn Seok-tae and Chung Chan-young—were called in to the Yongdong police station and accused of collaboration: They had given food to a friend who was a guerrilla. They were freed, but were forced to join a political “rehabilitation” group, and for them, as for countless unsuspecting Koreans in those fearful days, the repercussions would never end.
Word in Seoul was that wealthy citizens had put a high price on the heads of leading left-wingers in South Korea, and one by one they were, indeed, assassinated. In Yongdong, meanwhile, police entered the Salvation Army hospital, interrogated patients suspected of being insurgents, and then took them outside and shot them, the hospital’s director later reported.
* * *
When the insurgency was most intense, in 1949, guerrillas came down from the Yongdong County hills to sabotage the main rail line and attack and set fire to police stations. The terror also reached beyond the guardian rock of Sonang and far into the narrow valley of Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri.
The farmers worked hard in the summer, from before sunrise to past sunset, weeding their rice paddies and cutting wild grasses from the hillsides to combine with ox and pig manure into a fertilizer compost for next spring’s rice planting. That summer, villagers saw columns of soldiers scaling remote 3,000-foot heights where thick forest still stood, in search of rebels. The police evacuated and set fire to the dozen huts in Ahn Jom, the last hamlet up the valley, to deny its provisions to guerrillas. Some of the Ahn Jom refugees crowded into rooms in Im Ke Ri and Chu Gok Ri.
In August 1949, an old villager named Kim, cutting weeds for mulch above Im Ke Ri, heard young men scrambling up the slope. They ran sweating, panting past him, like game under pursuit. Soon policemen followed. He told them he didn’t know where their quarry had gone. “This old bastard is a Commie, too!” one officer shouted, sticking his rifle in the villager’s chest and pretending to pull the trigger. The others stayed his hand, but the old man was so shocked that he fell ill when he returned home and died several days later.
Old Kim had been away from his valley for sixteen years, working in a coal mine in Japan, and returned to Korea only after the war—one of almost one million Koreans who managed to come home from Japan, and a million others who returned from Manchuria, China and elsewhere. They were refugees in their own homes, many finding no work, adding to the millions of unemployed in southern Korea. Extra mouths to feed, American policy dislocations, guerrilla disruption, the loss of economic ties with the north—many factors pressed the people of Chu Gok Ri and the rest of South Korea deeper into desperation. If they had barley to eat, they were lucky.
But even in their daily struggle, the villagers never let go of dreams, especially the young. At the Yongdong middle school, Chung Koo-hun, now dignified and handsome at sixteen, finally was getting the real education he had hoped for. “I read Romeo and Juliet,” he recalled, “and it was an entirely different world.”
Shakespeare’s long-ago world of impossible young love lay far from Chu Gok Ri. But in those days the teenaged Koo-hun did find himself caught helplessly in something that couldn’t be. She was a village girl named Ke-soon. They crossed paths often in the dusty lanes of Chu Gok Ri, he running errands, she fetching water or laughing with girlfriends. They didn’t talk to each other, the sexes didn’t mix, but their eyes would meet and “speak” for an instant, and then he’d recover his senses. Falling in love was a foolish notion in young Koo-hun’s Korea, and marrying someone from one’s home village was worse than that. It was taboo.
At the right time, his family would settle on a suitable woman for him, from somewhere up the road. Until then, the young Shakespeare reader would have to forget this lovely girl. He tried to get Ke-soon out of his mind, only to find in the end that he was never far from hers.
* * *
More and more now, the outside world intruded on the people of Chu Gok Ri. Eun-yong, demoralized by his Cheju Island experience, disgusted with police corruption and fearing for his family, decided in mid-1949 to resign from the police. Relatives who had expected him to grow rich on the usual police graft had been surprised to find Eun-yong in Taejon with holes in his shoes and his family eating barley. At a cousin’s urging, he enrolled in a college in Seoul, hoping to become a lawyer or a professor. The cousin held out an even more impossible dream for him: to emigrate to America someday.
The police force that Eun-yong left behind was growing ever more violent. Summary executions of “communists” were routine. Bodies were dumped on doorsteps as warnings to others. By the spring of 1950, the dictatorial Rhee regime held an estimated 100,000 political prisoners in jam-packed jails, warehouses, any space that could be found. Tens of thousands of South Koreans, perhaps up to 100,000, were killed in the guerrilla war and repression of the late 1940s, according to later estimates.
The brutality was part of life in southern villages, an extension of the Japanese days. Chu Gok Ri villagers said the police, enforcing tax collections, hunting for anti-Rhee troublemakers, would gather people on the banks of the village stream, flog a few to intimidate all and slap even village elders in the face when their answers were unsatisfactory. “It was a lawless world where the police were the law,” said Chung Koo-hong, a son of the 1919 village patriot Chung Hee-yong.
Back in Washington, some U.S. officials expressed misgivings about the ruthless, undemocratic partner they had put in power in Korea, but they were largely ignored in the growing anticommunist fervor in America, especially now that the Soviet Union had exploded its first atom bomb and the communists had triumphed in China’s civil war. South Koreans were increasingly viewed as potential front-line shock troops in a global crusade. The U.S. government poured money and American military advisers into strengthening Rhee’s 100,000-man army, which was led by men who fought for the Japanese, and in training his police force. The Soviets did the same for the North Koreans.
The Americans kept heavy offensive weapons out of Rhee’s hands, since he had told them plainly he wanted to invade and reunite the north with his south. In bloody border skirmishes often provoked by the southern army, the two Koreas had clashed repeatedly along the 38th Parallel in mid-1949. As late as June 19, 1950, Rhee was asking Truman envoy John Foster Dulles for U.S. support for a cross-border invasion. For his part, the north’s Kim Il Sung had taken a hostile, if at times vague, public line toward the “Rhee clique,” declaring it would be destroyed. The northerners’ early hope was that southern guerrillas would do the job.
For despairing southerners, some signs of hope appeared by the spring of 1950. The Americans had finally pushed through a plan for land redistribution, and election results that May promised to undercut Rhee’s power. But it was too late.
A Korean proverb has it that “shrimp get broken backs in a whale fight.” The anthropologist Osgood, in the timeless villages of a fading Korea, foresaw the catastrophe whose seeds the foreigners had sown. “For better or worse,” he wrote, “the Koreans as a whole would have preferred to determine the course of events by themselves.”
On Sunday, June 25, 1950, Sun-yong and the children had come up from the south to visit her husband, the law student, in Seoul. The young mother was dressing four-year-old Koo-pil and two-year-old Koo-hee to take them to church. Suddenly a commotion arose outside, shouting in the streets, a siren. Eun-yong and his neighbors gathered around a radio. “North Korean communists began invading across the 38th Parallel at four A.M. today,” a nervous announcer read. For the first time in a millennium, Korean armies would fight each other in civil war. Somewhere north of Seoul, the backs of the shrimp were already breaking.