Excavations, p.4
Excavations, page 4
“Do you want me to stay?”
“No, I think I’ll try to sleep.”
“Do that,” Bo-ra said. “I’ll check on you tomorrow.”
Not knowing what to do now that she was alone, Sae filled the tub and undressed. It was too hot for a bath, but she needed to shock herself out of the rotation of unanswered questions. She examined the bruises on her arms and legs. Marks she did not remember acquiring. Raising boys was intensely physical work; her body was used as a shield multiple times a day to absorb the shocks of their play. How could she do this, continue to be this for them, without Jae? There was no one else. No one to call to deliver the news. No mother who would collapse to her knees on the receiving end of the line. When Seung-min had first been born, she had pressed Jae about his family again, armed with a newfound curiosity about lineage and history. She recalled the stiffening of his shoulders, his retreat with every additional question.
She splashed her face with water and pressed her eyes shut to clear these thoughts. He would be home soon. There would be a good explanation. They would laugh about it afterward, relieved not to have lost what they now knew they had, and guilty that others had not been so lucky.
She sat in the bath, her knees like island peaks in the water. Jae had teased her about how smooth they were. This is not the knee of a soldier of the revolution, he said. When they had first slept together it had been in a motel with a leaking roof and flickering light from a broken traffic signal outside. Jae with his Hollywood actor jaw and cashew nut eyes when he smiled. She remembered feeling overwhelmed—the soft drip of the rain into the small stainless steel bowl, the light that kept shifting the shadows across his body, the knowledge that tomorrow would bring another protest and that they might not be so lucky to get away from the police again.
There was a sound in the corridor outside the apartment. Rising from the water, she dried herself quickly and leapt to the door. But the kitchen was as she left it—Jae’s jacket still waiting for him, cradled by the chair.
* * *
—
The green cuckoo clock on the wall announced that it was two A.M. Almost thirty-six hours since the Tower had collapsed. Was it a mistake to have returned home instead of staying on the site, monitoring every rescue and development? Here in the apartment, she kept discovering herself suspended. She felt she was on a tightrope, unable to move forward in her waiting. She picked up the scattered toys in the living room and washed the few dishes in the sink.
Turning on the TV she found that she could not keep track of the characters or the story line. She switched it off and tipped the spines of several books before finding the book that she wanted. She traced the margin notes written in Jae’s neat handwriting. For years they had left notes for each other in books that they passed between them, leaving words that felt too vulnerable to say out loud, or later, after the children were born, that there never seemed to be the right moment to say.
Once, she had picked up the novel Immortality, which Jae had impressed her many times that she should read and found that he had underlined the words: “In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.” In the margins, he had written The days feel long without you. We miss you.
Now, she picked up the old copy of What Is History? and flipped through its pages, searching for the margin note she had left him.
Meet me at the clock tower at noon on Wednesday.
* * *
—
What Sae had not written in the margins for Jae in that copy of What Is History?: that she had come to university naïve, harboring the hope that her childhood friend Il-hyung might have become worldly enough to notice that her feelings for him were no longer strictly platonic. It had happened the year before he left for university—they had been lying on the pavilion by the sea in the dark when a self-consciousness had come over her. A realization that anything was possible between them—something sexual in nature, or perhaps even violent—that no one would need to know about. They had spent most of their childhood together, alone in fields or by the seaside, and it was the first time that she had wondered whether he had ever seen her as a woman, rather than as a conjoined twin. This line of thinking led her to reevaluate their friendship, and later laid the crumbs toward desire. By the time Il-hyung left for university, she was sure she was in love with him.
Sae and Il-hyung wrote to each other in the year that they were apart—he was a year older—until the letters began to peter out. At first, she thought it was because they were aware that they would spend more time together when she went to attend the same university, but when she saw him again, she sensed that he had changed. He had grown his hair long and wore wire glasses too large for his face. The first time they met on campus, where she was now a freshman, was at the corner of the university. His eyes had remained on the busy student-filled streets, on the plainclothes police officers on every block. It seemed he could look at everything but her.
He had become a student of film, and every question Sae asked him seemed to lead back to the same place.
“If you think about it, it’s not just that these hostess films are cheap to make,” he said. “It distracts the masses from what’s going on in the country. Better to be satiated with a cheap thrill than to consider the plight of the working class, right?”
Sae nodded, though she was surprised by the turn in the conversation.
He stopped suddenly at the street corner and met her eyes directly for the first time.
“What I’m saying, Sae, is that romance is the ultimate fantasy. It’s a red herring. Focusing on individual relationships is a distraction from what we can do for the community, for society as a whole.”
At last Sae understood. He seemed to be trying to find a way to tell her indirectly why he had not replied to her letters. Before Sae could respond, Il-hyung pointed to a door and led her down a basement stairwell to a small underground café where a small group of students had gathered around a table.
“What do you remember being told about the Gwangju uprising three years ago?” a narrow-faced upperclassman asked them after he poured each of them a mug of hot barley tea.
Sae remembered very little. There had been a small article in the paper about a skirmish in the city. Four North Korean infiltrators had tried to incite revolution in the city.
“It was reported as a small uprising of communist sympathizers, downplayed in the papers as a small event. But there have been rumors that there was a lockdown. That thousands of ordinary civilians were killed by the military. Some were buried in mass graves outside of the city,” Il-hyung said. Turning toward Sae, he said, “Doesn’t it unsettle you that something like this could have happened and that we knew nothing about it?”
The upperclassman threw a book into Sae’s lap. The photocopied pictures were grainy, but the violent motion was clear. The blurred baton swinging in from the edge of the photograph was a second strike. The pregnant woman was lying on the ground, her head in a halo of blood.
“This is what our fascist government is willing to do to anyone who dares to dissent.”
Sae looked up at Il-hyung, sickened, unsure why he was subjecting her to this. Then she remembered the student who had confronted a professor about his lecture on the circumstances of the dictator’s rise to power. “What about Gwangju?” he had asked. “Are we going to talk about what happened there?” The professor had dismissed them early, and the student had not shown up in class again. At the time she had not given it much thought—it was easier to believe that he had become disillusioned with the professor and had given up the class. Now she saw another possibility. That he had been silenced. And suddenly she did believe it—that an entire city could be held under siege while the rest of the country was deaf and blind.
“It’s time to wake up and confront what has been sacrificed in the name of progress. History,” Il-hyung paused, his eyes meeting Sae’s, “is not as we have been told.
“They told us extremists and rebels stormed the city. They lied. They told us no civilians were killed. They lied. These were students and civilians who had gathered to call for the end of martial law. These were students our age, gunned down by paratroopers. Demonstrators and innocent bystanders were slaughtered. The families of those who were missing were too afraid to go to the authorities. How can it be that the deaths of so many can go unnoticed? Can be forgotten so easily? How can it be that we are learning about what happened from foreign newspapers?”
Two students in the group had begun weeping; others were looking at Il-hyung, studying him intently as if they were unsure whether to believe him. She was not used to this new, serious version of him. In high school, Il-hyung’s tendency had been to resort to humor in moments of tension. She did not know what to make of this authoritative persona, this newfound charisma, and could only hope that the mask would come off in private. But even as she maintained her suspicion of his performance, she was deeply troubled by what had been revealed at the meeting. So when, several hours later, the upperclassmen invited them to consider becoming involved in a book group where they would study banned texts, she agreed immediately.
As she got up to leave, she felt Il-hyung’s hand on her shoulder. He handed her a book wrapped in newspaper.
“You should read this.”
When she tried to unwrap it to look at the cover, he stopped her.
“Wait until you get home, and don’t get caught with it. We’ll discuss it next week.”
* * *
—
Back at her desk, in her dormitory, Sae switched on the light and removed the newspaper from the book jacket. What Is History? and the author’s name, Edward Hallett Carr, were embossed in gold lettering on the hardback. She read as fast as she could, flipping through the Korean-English dictionary to look up the words she didn’t know.
When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone-deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.
Sae drew back in her chair. A small scrawl at the corner of the page caught her attention. Who wrote our history textbooks? In all their years in education, had they ever been invited to interrogate anything or anyone? History was equated to science. The facts were simply facts. Irrefutable. What had happened at Gwangju proved that what they knew of events had been distilled, facts buried. If they did not know what was happening in the country, then they had no grasp of history. If they had no grasp of history, they did not know who they were. Carefully placing the book back in its newspaper cover, she slipped out of the room and onto the roof. Her heart raced; she was terrified by all that she could not answer. Down in the garden, the day’s laundry remained on the line. Farther down the mountain, the bright lights of downtown Seoul burned with industry. No doubt there were still people working throughout the night to reach the ambitious deadlines their employers had set them. Even as students they were expected to work from dawn until dusk. There was never time for rest or leisure, let alone contemplation or to challenge the way things were.
After her father’s death, Sae had decided that she would do everything she could to leave Mallipo, go to Seoul National University, and then return to support her mother. She became a workhorse, mechanically memorizing what she needed to know for the exams—going straight to her desk as soon as her school hours were finished and studying late into the early hours of the morning. She did not allow herself to feel—not hunger or thirst or loneliness. She imagined university to be the antidote to their descent into poverty; she hoped it would reroute her mother’s walk. Each day, her mother took the long path home from the market to avoid a confrontation with her debtors. There was a practical reality promised by a degree, but university also held the promise of a completely different experience from the days of rote learning in her high school classes—the hope of feeling inspired, witnessing an impassioned debate with a professor, freedom, the decadence of discussing a theoretical idea. University held the promise of intellect being pushed, and wonder being nurtured.
When her first professor, a small man wearing a neat knitted vest despite the late August heat, entered the classroom and began speaking in a soft, shaky voice, her hopes dissipated. They had been tricked into industrious studiousness and sold a false dream. As the sociology class unfolded, she saw that the class was an extension of those she had in high school. They were there to listen and focus on preselected texts. Any time a student raised their hand to ask a question, the instructor would shut it down. Later she would learn that the presence of state agents in the lecture halls had stifled everyone.
After that first meeting Il-hyung had invited her to, Sae soon discovered that the education that mattered was taking place underground. Her classmates studied texts they smuggled in, like Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? They had animated discussions, drawing parallels between the industrial development described in Marx’s Capital and what was happening in South Korea. No one had been allowed to criticize the government’s ambitious economic agenda, but in these groups the seniors spoke openly and critically about how the economic development of their country was based on what was equivalent to slave labor. Sae got much more from the close readings and discussions of these texts than she got in any classroom. She was undecided about whether communism was really the best system for society but thought people should have the opportunity to decide for themselves. What really bothered her was the suppression of truth, the idea that they were inculcated into a system that hid texts and withheld key facts to present a heroic and clean version of history. She believed knowledge shouldn’t be an instrument of power but something that was freely available to everyone. They were told that resistance to unjust authority was a waste of their youth and their privilege. After all, they were lucky enough to have the opportunity for an education while other college-aged workers struggled to make a living wage.
The necessity of dismantling the dictatorship was the only thing Sae was sure of; it became the most important thing to her. She stopped going to her classes. Her schoolwork seemed trivial. She and others in the student movement used every opportunity to voice their resistance and disapproval of the dictatorship. They believed it was the right use of their privilege, to not simply tend to their own interests and status but to look after others.
In her first year in the movement, there were small protests on an almost-daily basis. She was responsible only for the gathering of pebbles to throw at the armed guards during the protests. Older classmates would tell her when and where to be for the next demonstration, often a mere half hour before she was to be there. After that first summer she was introduced to more members of the underground family, senior students who had organized the protests for years. They taught her how to make Molotov cocktails, gave her more books to read, listened and engaged in meaningful debates with her. By her final year of university, she was responsible for recruiting and educating younger students. Slowly, she felt herself detach from Il-hyung. She couldn’t help but notice that he often asked the female students to prepare snacks and meals while the male students pored over the texts, or suggested that they offer childcare while the male students helped farmers with their farmwork and learned about their production cycles. The other female students thought her to be arrogant because she refused to make coffee for the older senior male students during the meetings. One of the older female students told her off for causing faction within the movement with her feminist principles. Who had time for women’s rights, they said, when democracy was at stake?
They had been working for a cause that should have brought them a sense of unity. Instead, she had felt alone. Part of the alienation was intentional. They were not to become too familiar with one another, so that there would be nothing to reveal in an interrogation should they get caught.
Over time Sae began to feel weary, having absorbed the anguish and resentment of the parents whose homes she cleared of evidence whenever one of her classmates was arrested. One mother had thrown a cup of water over her, blaming her for her son’s involvement in the movement. For the interrogation that the whole family would endure as a result.
So when she found Jae waiting for her at the clock tower, a week after meeting him, the first thing she had felt was shame. Had she been sincere in wishing to induct him into the movement? She had only wanted to see him again.
“You found my note,” she said.
He was wearing a wrinkled plaid shirt and a pair of faded jeans. The same pair of split-soled shoes from when they had met in the library. He seemed nervous, looking over his shoulder every now and then. In the daylight his face seemed narrower, his features more delicate than she remembered.
“I wanted to see you again,” he began, his eyes still roaming the crowd of students around them. “I mean…” he said, putting his fists into his front pockets. “I wanted to talk to you about the book. It’s left me with a lot of questions.”
He held in his eye a raw weariness, as if looking upon the world through a new filter or lens. It had happened to her, too. That look that questioned everything. She wanted to put him at ease. To be able to comfort him with the touch of a hand.
“Why don’t we take a walk? Go somewhere a little quieter?”
He gave her the smallest of smiles and let her lead the way.
