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CHAPTER 1

The woman peddler, who sold cabbages and radishes from the basket she carried on her head, was making her early morning round of the neighborhood, hawking.

"Caaaaaabbage! Raaaaaaaadish!"

I walked out of my house to the road leading to Five Mounds Park. The paved road, still wet from the rain last night, was already bustling with people on their way to the park for morning exercise. In my tidy suit, shiny shoes and straight necktie — attire that looked so out-of-place among these healthy, casually-dressed people — I joined this flowing procession of the cheerful. A man and wife in loose gym suits bicycled up the slanted road, their hips wiggling right-left-right-left in perfect concert; a whole family out for a walk, everybody in clean tennis shorts; a little girl with a big red comical ribbon on her head, sitting astride her father's neck; a trio of grandfathers with white plastic jugs going to the fountain to draw the fresh unprocessed water; a group of fat grandmothers with small feet in smaller sneakers waddling up the road, carrying towels and badminton rackets and shuttlecocks; five girls with the same blue headbands, who probably roomed together and worked at the same factory, jogging hop-two-hop-two; people jogging up, people jogging down; a lean middle-aged man walking backwards all the happy people coming to Five Mounds Park every morning from the Pulgwang, Ungam, Yokchon, Kusan, Kalhyon and Sinsa districts to breathe the fresh moist air before beginning another routine day. Someone gave the Johnny Weissmuller yell, playing the urban Tarzan, as he did at this hour every morning on the hill behind Suguk Temple I joined their procession because I wanted to float in the stream of ordinary happy life shared by all these ordinary happy people. How simple and easy it looked, for them Perhaps something happy would happen to me today, I thought

A dozen young men in bright scarlet uniforms, probably members of a neighborhood cycling club, pedaled down the road, stooping low, making slow, interchanging, waltz loops, and wheeled around the curve lined with newly pruned young plane trees These people did not seem to have too much difficulty in finding their happiness. They found their simple joys easily because they did not waste themselves and their lives in a futile quest They were happy because they kept their dreams as they were — dreams. Perhaps I had been wrong to think that a life hounded by unrealized dreams was better.

The world-record speed of a snail, established on glass in 1970, was 2 feet in three minutes, 0 00758 miles per hour We used to drive our jeeps at 110 kilometers per hour on Highway 1 m Vietnam to avoid VC snipers Now I crawled my life away like a mollusc Like a slug Slugs are hermaphroditic, I thought Must be very convenient in procreating But I was a sterile slug.

The guard at the gate of the Combat Police Unit watched the stream of morning people come and go, jogging and bicycling and rambling. The guard was armed with an M-16, although the main duty of Seoul's combat police was to crack down on anti-government demonstrators with tear gas shells How badly we had wanted such M-16s in Vietnam. In the first six months we were not supplied with these newly-developed rifles and had to fight with heavy, inconvenient, single-loading M-ls against an enemy fully armed with automatic weapons.

Over the slanted road, past the Green Belt and then past the border of the metropolitan city and the neighboring Kyonggi Province, I walked among the joggers and bicyclists and strollers until I arrived at a lone cottage by the watch tower In the open-air front yard of the wooden shingled cottage they sold snacks and hot soup for those on the way back home after exercise, families or groups of people, their hair wet with sweat, sat around the log tables to eat green bean pancakes, roast potato slices, cow blood soup, steamed pig hooves or makkolli rice wine I took a seat at a roadside table and ordered a bowl of hot rice soup.

By the archery range, cordoned off for the night by a straw rope, two middle-school girls were playing badminton, giggling every time they missed the bird And they missed every time. Yellowjackets and red tee-shirts and tight white pants Springy youth. Wondrous, pure, innocent. Yes, those girls soon would pass the first gates of maturity, and then begin to feel and distinguish the different shades of despair, rebellion, fear, delusion The conflict would commence. I had begun to look back at the road not taken, I thought.

Why had I been always obsessed by a sense of alienation, of feeling that I was somewhere else, somewhere I did not belong, while my life was progressing by itself out of my reach? Why was I always tailgated by the anxiety that I should be at some other place doing something else? My life was running away from me. What was the important thing I was destined to do here, now, today, on this spot, in this phase of my Me? There must be something else I had to do in the given hours of my life other than checking the wrong fonts, redundant expressions, broken type or awkward phrases on the printed page, squatting before my desk day after day after day after day. I was sure I was wasting the only life I was given to live.

After soothing my empty stomach with the hot soup, I continued on down the paved road and arrived at the open ground among the pine trees at the entrance of the park For some time I loitered about, watching the groups of people cheerfully sweating through their aerobic workouts, posing rigidly in a yoga contortion on a mat, stiffly flexing their limbs like slow-motion break dancers, jogging or walking around the marked trees counting three-hundred- and-thirty-six, three-hundred-and-thirty-seven, wiping their sweating faces with the towels hanging on their necks or hips, pedaling, or having an early breakfast and leisurely watching others Near the park gate, I queued with the old ones carrying white plastic water jugs, took a bus and came straight downtown.

At 8.04 a.m. I entered the office, plugged in the coffee pot, and sat down before my desk to read the morning newspapers. U.S. Develops Soundless Sub Equipped With 8 Torpedo Launchers. Chinese Pilots to Be Trained in U S. U.S Willing to Purchase Chinese-Made MIG-21s for Training Purposes. Efforts to Maintain Military Superiority of South Korea Over North U S Assistant Defense Secretary Warns About Possibilities of North Koreas Invasion of South

The front page was, as usual, bursting with warlike phrases and all sorts of intimidating military-related stories I turned a page, but they were the same old pieces all over again. Saudis Order Immediate Shoot Down of Planes Violating Territorial Air Airborne Early-Warning Platforms Useless — Information Transmission Too Slow USSR Plans Deployment of Blackjack Bombers to Far East Iran Violates Limited Ceasefire, Shells Civilian Districts in Al Basrah Japan Alerts Fleet on Spotting Russ Planes. Killing Robots Operated by Artificial Brain — Effective for Defense of Pipelines, Airports..

Chapter 1 was also screaming madly about armed conflicts. The ailing earth. The Russians suddenly stepping up their mopping-up operations along the Afghanistan border, the intensifying confrontation between Prime Minister Gandhi and the Sikhs, the Moslems and Communist guerrillas rampaging on Mindanao in the Philippines, General William Westmoreland suing Mike Wallace and CBS in another grueling battle of the doomed and rejected Vietnam War, Iran and Iraq wasting themselves in lethal attrition that did not seem to get anybody anywhere much, the Strait of Hormuz turning into a powder keg, Chinese and Vietnamese troops clashing, the American CIA sinking more and more deeply into the mire of Latin America, the eternal religious conflicts in Belfast.

The fog, that had thickly filled the gray space of the urban sky, slowly cleared off, and another day of noise and smog set in. At nine o'clock all the employees gathered for civil defense force training in the auditorium on the third floor The instructors showed us some old scratched and hazy slides of the Korean War; the anniversary of its outbreak was only days away Robert Capa's Life photograph of the refugees crossing the bombed, skeletal Taedong River Bridge, of course, was included in the show. Another slide showed heaps of dead bodies scattered in the snowy field like abandoned bundles of rag. A familiar snowscape of my childhood. There was also the much-used slide showing Hungnam Port in a snow storm where an estimated 100,000 refugees had gathered to escape on the retreating U.S naval ships from the North Korean and Chinese Communists. The countless heads jammed on the pier reminded me of the newsreels dramatizing the desperate Vietnamese trying to enter the American Embassy compound in Saigon in the final week of the regime.

The narrator of the slide show suddenly got emotional explaining in her propaganda falsetto, "And remember our young boys in the 1950s who volunteered to fight as student soldiers against the Communist aggressors" I remembered The sorrowful refugee life in Pusan. The shanties built with broken planks and C-ration boxes The massacred civilians, their hands tied with barbed wire. Dead bodies piling over dead bodies. Mass killings casually done by human beings of other human beings

My maternal uncle was mobilized as a student soldier and spent painful days of hunger and cold, herded from one place to another on drafty freight trains, he was sent home one year later, emaciated and terrified, because the army had no weapons with which to arm him and his comrades There was also a black-and-white slide of a young boy standing alone in the rubble of a bombed ruin. The boy looked just like me at that time — dirty, ragged, starved, frightened, full of lice. There were so many "war orphans" and orphanages when I was a child. And so many pickpockets and bootblacks. The GIs called the pickpockets "slicky boys" and called us "gooks," the degenerate form of Hanguk, meaning "Korea," and we called the American soldiers Yankees or bengko, meaning "big nose." The relief goods sent by American Red Cross and other organizations were the most luxurious riches for the destitute Koreans — clothes, watches, pencils, thread, papers, toys, and so many beautiful marbles.

When the war broke out I was a second grader in grammar school, and I had to support my family by selling American cigarettes and polishing shoes on the streets. In wartime soldiers and men and women, and even children, had to do things they would not do in a normal society One night my father sneaked into a stranger's rice paddy, cut the rice ears with his scissors and stuffed them into a paper bag, then stole back home through the moonless dark. My mother wept to see the handful of rice he had stolen for us

We twined straw rope and sold it to barely sustain ourselves. The whole family used to file the jags off rough aluminum chopsticks all day long to make enough money for one meal of pressed barley and "trash soup." We did everything and anything that could feed us

My father was imprisoned for several months on charges of cooperating with the Communist enemy because he had been forced by the People's Army to work for the district police station, but we were not too sad, for he had not made much money anyway, while consuming most of the food. A few days after his release my mother asked him to look after "the shop" while she did some laundry. The shop consisted of a small pan and a rusty iron tray which she spread on the ground in the back alley by the prison to fry slices of cuttlefish and display them to tempt the hungry children in the neighborhood When my mother finished washing the clothes and went back to the shop, she found my father guiltily sitting before the empty tray It was a sunny day. I still vividly remember the spinning dazzle of the summer sun that afternoon He had starved too long in prison to keep his hands off those delicious cuttlefish fries My mother wept again because my father had eaten "the whole shop"

My life had been a succession of wars When I was born in December of 1941, the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor and attacking the Philippines. Born during the Great War, I spent my childhood in the Korean War, and then a part of my youth fighting in Vietnam If somebody asked me to tell about my childhood, I would have endless stories about the days when I sang military songs, like "Over the Bodies of Fallen Comrades-in-Arms" or "Brave Fighters Flying to the North," instead of nursery rhymes. And more endless stories about the snow-covered ridges and hills I had to walk over during days and nights with the serpentine procession of refugees, the bombings, dark smoke rising from bombarded Yongsan depot, the bread the retreating American soldiers left behind at the school playground, the C-ration cans the GIs threw at us from the passing trucks, the relief supplies shipped by the United States Red Cross, the naval bombardment from Inchon night after night, the soldiers' hardtack that was the only delicacy we war children had, the wheezing roar of the military trucks retreating at night, the prostitutes for the U N. Forces called "the U.N Princesses," my father dragged away by the Communists for labor mobilization, the miserable meals of "piggie soup" (the garbage from the U S mess halls boiled again after removing coffee-grounds, cellophane paper, broken razor blades and other inedibles) or the gruel of liquor lees and sticky rice, the clothes infested with lice, the arrowroot that you kept chewing forever for its sweet juice, the Lucky Strike cigarette packs with big red circles, and the famous euphemism of "the tactical retreat" that actually meant the U. N Forces' defeat by the Communist Chinese troops And of my sister Kija whom we had to abandon in the snowy field because we could not take her with us ...

Alarmed by the rumor that the Chinese troops, who were overpowering the U N Forces everywhere with their "Human Sea Tactics," would soon sweep down to Seoul, my family fled to Sosa. My father remained in Seoul to watch the situation till the last minute, but he could not join us again until the war was almost over because we were forced to leave Sosa before he finally came to find us. We had been at grandmother's for a week or so when American and Korean soldiers swarmed into Simgok village and told everyone to evacuate because the Communists would arrive soon. So we had to leave without father. Mother and grandmother packed some of the things that they thought were absolutely necessary for our survival on the road for an indefinite period and a neighbor kindly allowed us to load some of the "refugee bundles" and my siblings on his ox-cart. A second grader at that time, I plodded interminably to the south, trailing after my mother along the road that seemed to stretch out to infinity. The refugees trudged over the white mountains Carrying bundles of clothes or bedding or cooking tools or rice or other necessities, carrying them on their heads or backs or hugging them in their arms or holding them in their hands, they meandered to the south like a long white thread Near Anyang, we saw soldiers blocking the road. They said we must leave all carts and wagons there because they would impede the flow of the military retreat. Men and cattle could go on, but not vehicles In a snowy field littered with countless carcasses of discarded carts and wagons, the refugees packed their bundles smaller so that they could carry them. Mother and grandmother could carry almost nothing, for my siblings could not walk My sister Kisuk, who was two years younger than me, had died of tuberculosis immediately after the war broke out and my youngest sister Kihyon was not born yet, but there were still three of them — Kija, Kyong and Kiwan — whom somebody had to carry Mother and grandmother could carry one child each but one still remained And they had no idea how far we still had to walk. So they had to give up one child. They decided to abandon Kija She was squint-eyed because, mother used to say, she had not had sufficient nourishment. She had to share mother s milk with my brother Kijong who was born nine months after her. Besides this physical defect, she had the disadvantage of being a girl My mother and grandmother reasoned that a girl should rightfully be sacrificed to save two sons. They spread several layers of thick bedding that they or other refuge families had discarded on the snow- covered field, set Kija upright on them like an image of Buddha, placed two more layers of warm clothes on her head and shoulders, wrapped her tiny hands with woolen mufflers and put a rice ball on her right palm, and placed several more rice balls in a row on the bedding spread before her knees so that she could eat them later when hungry We continued on our way south, my mother crying her heart out the whole time. Kija, who was four years old then, did not cry because she did not know what was happening to her; holding a rice ball in her wrapped hand, she just stared blankly after us, as we deserted her in the middle of nowhere

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Excerpted from "White Badge"
by .
Copyright © 1989 Ahn Junghyo.
Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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