The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (49 page)

She laughed when he said that. “You are still not good!”

“Yet it is I who am alive,” he retorted, “and my poor brother is dead.” For Yul-chun knew, as all Koreans knew, how his brother and Induk had met their end, and with them their daughter who would not be separated from her mother and so Induk had taken her to the Christian church that day.

“Prudent and careful and good, it was he whom they killed,” Yul-chun now reminded Hanya. “You see why I say a man should not have a wife and children?”

“Be quiet,” she told him.

It was her usual rejoinder when he said what she did not like to hear. It had come to such a pass of love between them that what he had once said seriously he said at last in play, for he believed she knew that he loved her although he would never tell her so. Part of the play, or so he thought, was her pleading to be told and his refusal.

“Tell me you love me—tell me only once so that I have it to remember!” This was her plea.

“I will not,” he always replied, “for if I do, I have no defense against you. You will get so far inside me that I shall never be able to root you out. Words are like iron nails hammered into hard wood.”

“You do love me?” she coaxed.

“What do you think?” he asked, biting back the words that would say he loved her.

“I think you do,” she said in the same soft voice, “and since you do, why not tell me so?”

“Ah ha,” he had cried, “you nearly caught me, but I am too clever for you.”

So he had never said he loved her and now she was gone and he could not tell her if he would. He waited seven days more, sleepless with longing, his body demanding her presence, but he would not yield to his own demand. If he went after her, then he would never be free again. He rose one night in the small hours, desperate with weariness and longing, and he packed his knapsack and set out for the south on foot and alone.

… He traveled three thousand miles, on foot and on horseback, and lived through many months before he reached the city of Canton in South China. He lingered here and there on the way to see how the people lived and whether there could be reason to expect revolution, for he was too just by nature to believe that they should be compelled, nor would he allow himself to use these Chinese land people to strengthen the cause of freedom for his own people. He was not able to make up his mind as he walked the country roads and passed through villages and slept in small inns. The people were a cheerful, cruel people, accepting hardship and dealing hardly with any whom they thought unfriendly, too gay for suffering, although they spoke robustly against the times, grieving that they had no ruler in Peking now that revolutionists had destroyed the imperial throne.

“Oh, that we had our Old Buddha again,” they told him. “She was our father and mother. While she lived, we knew we were safe. Now who knows what will happen to us?”

They spoke of the Empress Tzu Hsi. She had died many years ago, yet such had been her power over their minds and hearts that he came upon villages where the people did not know she was dead and when he told them, they were afraid. The difference between the Chinese and his own people was that the Chinese were still free. If they had no government, as indeed they had not, for Sun Yat-sen with all his followers had not been able to set up a new government in the vast and ancient country, at least the people were free to govern themselves according to family tradition and habit, which they did, so that the country was at peace except for the war lords battling among themselves for a chance to rule, and the revolutionists who were young and full of discontents. In spite of all, the land people farmed their fields and the sea people caught fish, and the river people lived in boats, crowding the canals and rivers and the coastal towns. He doubted much that the vast continent and the countless people could be roused to revolution or indeed whether they should be roused. Their lives were stable in custom and tradition and they were not starving and no one oppressed them except here and there a greedy landlord. He heard laughter and lively wit in the teashops where men gathered, and children were fat, and women were busy. Against whom then could they rebel? They asked only to be let alone, and more than once some old man or young would quote to him the ancient saying of Lao-tse, that the governing of a people was like the cooking of a small fish, it should be done lightly.

The further he traveled the more he marveled that one country could be so vast and contain such variety in landscape and people. Desert in the north and northwest spread into rich plains, and here the fields were wide and the land people grew wheat and dry crops and they ate wheaten bread and millet and they were tall and fair-skinned and they reeked of garlic, for the favorite food of the countryfolk was a thin sheet of unleavened bread rolled around stalks of garlic. The northern cities were busy with shops of every kind, the markets plentiful and the streets wide. The people wore cotton garments, in winter padded with cotton, and if one wore silk, he covered it with a cotton outer robe.

In the central part, above and below the Yangtse, a river as wide as a sea for a thousand miles, where steamships of many countries came and went and foreign warships kept watch at treaty ports, the country grew mountainous, but not as his country was. Here the mountains were green and gentle and the valleys were spread in fertile plains between. The people were tall but not so tall as those in the north, and there were many cities, richly crowded with shops. The people were less simple, too, than those of the north, indeed they were often crafty and worldly, even shrewd, but they were gay and full of talk and laughter, the women lively and free in coming and going as they liked, except for the ladies in rich men’s houses who stayed inside their walls.

One whole winter he spent in the city of Shanghai, for here he found some three thousand Koreans gathered and he soon made a place for himself among those who printed a magazine called
Young Korea
. Yet again he discovered his compatriots divided, and this time into two main groups, those who still favored Americans—and these were for the most part Christians and educated in the United States, and believed in nonviolent revolution—and the second group who were for the Russian method of revolution and were all for direct attack against the Japanese now ruling in Korea. Both groups received money secretly from Korean patriots in Korea and the exiles elsewhere.

Yul-chun lived at first among those who still believed in Americans, and from them he learned much that he had not known of those people who had befriended his country through their missionaries and then had betrayed it through their politicians. He hated them for the betrayal, but as he learned of them through the leader of Koreans who had spent many years in the United States, it was not the history or the nature of the Americans that moved him to relinquish some of this hatred. Instead he was moved by their songs. While he was in school in the United States, this leader had learned many songs, especially the songs of the black people who were slaves there, and he had returned to Korea with these songs in his soul and had taught them to schoolchildren. Now, exiled in the vast, heartless city of Shanghai, he taught the songs to his fellow exiles. In the evenings as they gathered in the shabby room they had rented as their meeting place, these Koreans sang the songs of the African slaves in America.

Yul-chun at first refused to sing, partly because he did not know the songs, but also because he feared anything which might soften his heart so that he could feel pain. Yet in spite of his determination, his heart did soften as he listened to the voices of his fellow exiles, singing the mournful music of slaves. He was haunted by the melodies in the songs, “Old Black Joe,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground.” Melancholy music, tragic words, which somehow comforted their sad hearts, and one night Yul-chun found himself weeping as he sang.

This weeping frightened him. He had not wept since he was a child in his father’s house and he had long believed that he could never weep again, for he had seen too much of torture and danger and death for weeping. He resolved that he must put such music far away from him, knowing how music could seduce his people. And to this end he left these exiles and joined the terrorists, a small secret group here in the city who had dedicated themselves to killing and destruction.

It was not the first time that Yul-chun had been with them. His childhood tutor, the gentlest of men, who had trained him in the nonviolence of Confucius and in the merciful compassion of Buddha, when he joined the Tonghak, had become the most reckless of terrorists. It seemed that this kindly and mild young man was compelled to make a sacrifice of himself, and again and again he had committed the most ruthless acts. He had emigrated to Siberia and had formed the terrorist group called The Red Flag, and from there he had gone to Manchuria to take part in the assassination of Prince Ito, after which he himself was captured and put to death.

Now in Shanghai Yul-chun approached the second terrorist group, the Yi Nul Tan, or Society of Brave Justice. He was with them but not of them—not yet. He could not as yet commit himself wholly to death and destruction as the only weapons of revolution and especially when among these singlehearted young men he found division. For in this winter of the Christian year 1924, the Society of Brave Justice was split into three parts, Nationalist, Anarchist and Communist. He watched this division with growing cynicism, and the more because the most violent of the terrorists were also the most corrupt as men. They wore western dress, they oiled their hair, they made a cult of their appearance, and since most of them were tall and handsome young men, women sought them, and among these the most passionate were women of mixed Russian-Korean ancestry, the daughters of exiled patriots in Siberia.

One night in early spring Yul-chun walked in the park in the French section of Shanghai where the exiles lived, and he saw how these members of the Society of Brave Justice made rendezvous there with the women, how boldly they exchanged the acts of physical love, how wild these exchanges were and how promiscuous and how quickly forgotten. The fires in his own flesh were strong enough to be stirred and he could understand how young and desperate men, daily face to face with death, were compelled to find relief in brief and violent passion. But this was not his way. His eyes were on the goal of independence for his people and a wise and sensible plan for life. It was time for him to be on his way again, therefore, and he left Shanghai before the spring grew warm, and went south again.

… He arrived back in the city of Canton in the autumn of the year, at the time of the rice harvest. The fields were gay with cheerful harvesters, the crops were good and food would be plenty for the winter. Again he doubted that these Chinese people could be stirred to rebellion unless there was a war from outside, which was to say unless Japanese military men again dreamed their dreams of empire. Then he reminded himself that he was here for a greater cause than this. He was here to find those who could help him make Korea free.

… “You have come at last. And alone?”

This was Kim’s greeting and question. When Yul-chun had given up the magazine at Hanya’s insistence, after he had been ill with a heavy cough, Kim had left Peking in some disgust because, he said, Hanya had spoiled Yul-chun for a revolutionist. With several others he had come to Canton, they had rented two rooms in a house which was in a narrow crooked street where workers in ivory lived and plied their crafts. Tusks of ivory came whole from the jungles of Burma and Malaya and were sold to the craftsmen, who cut them and carved the pieces into ivory gods and goddesses and figures of men and women, into boxes and jewelry and every sort of object for use and beauty. Among these many families the exiles came and went unnoticed, all wearing Chinese dress.

“Alone,” Yul-chun replied.

He threw down his knapsack and shook off his worn sandals. The soles were in shreds and he had a stone bruise under his left instep. He sat down, nursing his foot in his hand, while Kim stood looking at him.

“Did she leave you or did you leave her?”

“She left me,” Yul-chun said shortly. “And I did not go after her,” he added.

“You look hungry,” Kim said next.

“I am not hungry,” Yul-chun replied in the same short voice. “I have been well fed all the way, especially in Shanghai.”

“Then you have another hunger,” Kim said, laughing. “Easily satisfied, comrade! Though how you could leave Shanghai with that sort of hunger—but we have many comrades here, too.”

“Who could believe you were ever a monk!”

Yul-chun nursed his painful foot as he spoke, and looked about the bare room. “Can you put a few boards on two benches for another bed?”

“I have been expecting you,” Kim said. “I have kept space for you here. No woman could satisfy you forever. I knew that I had only to wait.”

“How many Koreans are in Canton?” Yul-chun asked.

“Only about sixty,” Kim replied, “and they belong to the Yi Nul Tan.”

“Again! I have only just left them in Shanghai.”

“Russian advisers here are teaching them new methods, and it may be we shall need them in our own country when the time comes.”

“I have no confidence now in terrorists,” Yul-chun retorted. “They enjoy their work too much—and they leave fury behind them.”

“We can use them,” Kim said. He was dragging his bed to one side of the room and arranging a place for the other bed.

“Have you joined the Communists?” Yul-chun asked.

“Yes! If I am a revolutionist, let me be complete! And you?”

“No. I must be convinced that it is the best means for getting independence.”

“You cannot know until you become Communist yourself. Faith first, and then conviction.”

“That is the difference between us. You must have a faith. Not I! I have no faith in anything or anyone. And I am convinced that the Japanese will never be content with our small mountainous country. What they have been saying ever since the time of Hideyoshi is still true. For them Korea is only a stepping-stone to Asia. And now that I have seen China with my own eyes, the richness of its soil, their great cities, the skills of its people, I am convinced that whoever holds China holds Asia—and perhaps some day the world.”