You never forgot the face of the plainclothes policeman who had stamped on you. You never forgot that the government actively trained and supported the strikebreakers, that at the peak of this pyramid of violence stood President Park Chung-hee himself, an army general who had seized power through a military coup. You understood the meaning of emergency measure no. 9, which severely penalized not only calls to repeal the Yushin constitution but practically any criticism of the government, and of the slogan shouted by the scrum of students at the main entrance to the university. You pieced together the newspapers’ oblique strands of misinformation in order to make sense of the subsequent incidents that occurred in Busan and Masan. You were convinced that those smashed phone booths and burnt-out police boxes, the angry mobs hurling stones, formed a pattern. Blanked-out sentences that you had to fill with your imagination.
When President Park was assassinated that October, you asked yourself: Now the peak has been lopped off, will the whole pyramid of violence collapse? Will it no longer be possible to arrest screaming, naked factory girls? Will it no longer be permissible to stamp on them and burst their intestines? Through the newspapers, you witnessed the seemingly inexorable rise of Chun Doo-hwan, the young general who had been the former president’s favorite. You could practically see him in your mind’s eye, riding into Seoul on a tank as in a Roman triumph, swiftly appropriating the highest position in the central government. Goose bumps rose on your arms and neck. Frightening things are going to happen. The middle-aged tailor used to tease you: “You’re cozying up with that newspaper like it’s your new beau, Miss Lim. What a thing it is to be young, and be able to read such fine print without glasses.”
And you saw that bus.
It was a balmy spring day, and the owner of the dressmaker’s had taken his son, a university student, to stay with relatives in Yeongam. Finding yourself with an unexpected free day on your hands, you were strolling the streets when you spotted it, an ordinary bus on its way into the city center. END MARTIAL LAW. GUARANTEE LABOR RIGHTS. Yellow Magic Marker screamed out from the white banners that hung out of the bus’s windows. The bus was packed with dozens of girls from the textile factories out in the provincial towns, in their uniforms. Their pale faces put you in mind of mushrooms, which had never seen the sun, and they had their arms thrust out of the windows, banging sticks against the body of the bus as they sang. Their voices carried clearly all the way to where you had stopped in your tracks, and you remember them now as seeming to issue from the throat of some kind of bird.
We are fighters for justice, we are, we are
We live together and die together, we do, we do
We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees
We are fighters for justice
Every syllable so distinct in your memory. Entranced by that song, you stumbled blindly in the direction the bus had taken. A great throng of people had taken to the streets and were heading in the direction of the main square, in front of the Provincial Office. The students, who had been massing in front of their university’s main gate since early spring, were nowhere to be seen. Those filling the streets were the elderly; children of primary school age; factory workers in their uniforms; young office workers, the men wearing ties, the women in skirt suits and high heels; middle-aged men wearing sweaters emblazoned with the logo of the “new village” movement, brandishing long umbrellas as though intending to use them as weapons. At the very front of this snaking column of people, the corpses of two youths who had been gunned down at the station were being pushed, in a handcart, toward the square.
Now
You climb the narrow stairs and emerge from the underground station. The refreshingly chill blasts of the train’s air-conditioning had briefly dried the sweat on your skin, but now the humid air recongeals on your exposed flesh. It is a sweltering, tropical night. Though it’s now close to midnight, the wind is still heavy with heat.
You stop in front of the information board by the hospital’s entrance. Sliding your hands beneath the straps of your backpack, you quickly scan the timetable for the shuttle bus, see that it only runs during the day. Inhaling a lungful of lukewarm air, you turn away and begin to walk up the hill. Every now and then you wriggle a hand free and wipe away the sticky sweat that has trickled down from your neck.
Someone has spray-painted some crude graffiti on a shop’s lowered shutter. Some guys are lounging under a parasol in front of a twenty-four-hour convenience store, knocking back cans of beer. You look up at the main building of the university hospital, which stands at the very top of the hill. You hear the girls’ song carrying down across the years, from that bus in a past made hazy by time, all the way through to this night. We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees. Let’s join together for a minute’s silence in tribute to those who have already paid the price, let’s follow in their footsteps and fight to the end, because…because we are noble.
—
You pass through the main gate into the hospital complex, heading along the path that stretches all the way up to the main building, first branching off to the annex and funeral hall. Its soft contours are lined by streetlights on both sides. Wreaths are lined up at the entrance to the funeral hall. Near them, young men are silently applying themselves to their cigarettes, yellow armbands over their white shirts.
It’s late, but you are wide awake. The backpack is cutting into your shoulders and your back is drenched with sweat, but you don’t care. You keep on walking, remembered dreams lancing through your mind.
You plummet from the roof of a high-rise building, clad in a suit of armor linked with hundreds of iron scales. Even though your brains are dashed out against the ground, you don’t die. You pick yourself up, climb all the way back up the emergency stairs, walk straight over to the edge of the roof, and tip yourself off. Still you don’t die, and it’s back up the stairs to fall one more time. One layer of the dream unpeels, and you’re sufficiently aware of the situation to wonder: What good is a suit of armor if I’m falling from such a great height? You haven’t woken yourself up, though, merely passed through into another layer. You feel the weight of an enormous glacier bearing down on your body. You wish that you were able to flow beneath it, to become fluid, whether seawater, oil, or lava, and shuck off these rigid, impermeable outlines, which encase you like a coffin. Only that way might you find some form of release. Now this layer, too, unseams itself and collapses softly around you, exposing the dream’s ultimate core. You are standing in the streetlamp’s cone of ashen light, looking out into the gathering dark.
The dream grows less cruel as you move closer to wakefulness. Sleep grows thin, becomes brittle as writing paper, and eventually crumbles away. In the quiet corners of your conscious mind, memories are waiting. What they call forth cannot strictly be called nightmares.
You Remember