For the longest time of course I didn’t have enough things to eat let alone a drop of liquor and our goal was to keep a steady pace of eating once every two days. We were all starving every second we were awake and even in our dreams. I was often the hungriest of all of us because I’d give my portion to whoever looked like he was at the end of his rope. Sometimes when I handed my piece of dumpling to some kid cold sweat would break on my back because I’d be that hungry. I didn’t do that to buy anyone’s loyalty but ultimately that was how all these guys became closer to me than real brothers. Word got around that Nam JungHo under the bridge was the chief of all Jongno street children and that he feeds everyone who is loyal to him. By the time I was sixteen I had over forty kids under my command.
It was clear then that we couldn’t keep on living under the bridge much longer. It was a godawful place to live even for beggars and in summer the mosquitoes attacked every inch of you and in winter you froze to death almost every night and let me tell you, that gets old after a while. Whenever there was any kind of riot our tents of sacks and straw mats would be torn apart and destroyed. We hid in crannies in the levee that no one else could find and watched as the police burned everything we had down to the last wooden bowl and spoon. This was when Loach convinced me to change ourselves from beggars to “protectors.” Mind you this was not an easy thing to do to just barge into a little Chinese restaurant and demand fees for protecting the business from other gangs. Every neighborhood in every district of Seoul was claimed by one of several gangs both Japanese and Korean and those borders were strictly respected in order to avoid full-out war. I was starting from scratch having claimed no street as my own and with only a ragtag group of beggar boys who knew nothing about fighting. In fact if we weren’t in such a desperate situation I wouldn’t have had the courage to demand money from an elderly man who’d done nothing wrong to any of us. But it was shockingly easy at the end of the day. He took one look at me flanked by Loach and YoungGu and handed me the money with downcast eyes. I counted the money and gauged the going rate of these “protection fees” in the neighborhood and asked for twice that at the café next door. Here the owner was a lady in a floral-patterned blouse and heavy white makeup and she reminded me of a full moon with eyes drawn in charcoal. I’d seen enough women and girls around Seoul to know that she wasn’t beautiful with or without makeup but the simple fact that she was female made my demand even more uncomfortable and embarrassing. But this lady listened to me and handed me the money even giving a slight bow of her head.
Once word got around that we’d been claiming our territory the inevitable happened—that is, the other gangs started attacking us. By all normal odds we should have been utterly destroyed by these bullies who were older and more experienced than us, but we surprised everyone including ourselves by winning and reclaiming our rights. This may sound like bragging but fighting comes very easily to me. I once fought six guys simultaneously on my own and they had long Japanese swords but I ended up putting my knife straight through their leader’s left palm. He dropped the sword from his right hand and before it hit the ground I grabbed it and sliced off his ear with it and said next time I will strike off his head instead. No one challenged me after that and even the police stayed away from threatening my group.
Some people can’t hide their surprise when they see that I, the skinny and short one, am the chief and the best fighter in the whole district. They started saying that this was because I was the son of a tiger hunter who used to kill beasts with his bare hands, which of course wasn’t true but I didn’t exactly deny it. What I am is just faster than anyone else and I know how to use my opponent’s own power and weight against him and most importantly I am not afraid of sticking things into people if they get in my way. But I didn’t have to resort to such extreme measures to get the owner of that Chinese restaurant to “rent out” his back room to us for free and I settled several small groups in similar places nearby.
Pretty much overnight, we’d gone from sleeping outside to having a floor and a ceiling over our heads. This was actually not easy at first. It was hard to fall asleep at night with the walls that seemed to close in on me. It was so hot that I actually missed sleeping under the bridge and even those nights when you’d have to wake up every hour and shake the snow off the tent so it doesn’t collapse. The others also felt the same way and some kids actually ran away. YoungGu was shocked when I told him he couldn’t bring the dog into the room and that they’d have to sleep separately for the first time in years. The dog was tied to the chestnut tree in the back courtyard by the outhouse and for a good while it howled for entire nights. YoungGu thought I was sleeping but I know he snuck out in the middle of the night to go snuggle the dog and calm it down. He has always been and still is a complete mush. I can’t even believe that he was chief before I replaced him because despite being almost a head taller and broader than I am the guy has zero meanness inside. He’s not bad at fighting but I know he would rather do something else—perhaps become a Chinese restaurant owner himself.