LITMIR.BIZ

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boxes, ink and inkstones, rice paper, linen, calligraphy brushes, ivory and tortoiseshell combs. Familiar vendors crowed and yelled their bargain prices, competing with lowing cows and squawking fowl.

      I stared boldly at the other children strapped to their mothers’ backs or holding their grandmothers’ hands. They looked much more babyish than me; I was allowed to roam freely by my father’s side, making what I believed to be adult conversation.

      We bumped into Baby Uncle near the well in the square. His name was Gong-lae, but I called him Baby Uncle, as he was the youngest of the Min brothers. Bending down, Uncle pinched my cheek and stole a piece of toffee in one motion. Then my father told me to wait for him by the willow tree while he and Baby Uncle went into a small office to deliver some papers to a colleague. Uncle bought me a rice cake. I sat down near an old grandmother, and inspected the cake, which I dismantled and ate kernel by kernel to make it last as long as possible, and surveyed the crowd, quite giddy with happiness.

      My father eventually came out of the little building, and furtively tucked an envelope into his breast pocket. He looked a little happier than before, and swung my hand in his as we walked back down the street to the bicycle. With father’s help, I squashed back into the basket, legs dangling out, and we pushed off heavily onto the dusty track, wobbling off for a few yards as we headed back home.

      I did not realise then how terrible those spring days were for my father. That day, as every day since June 1910, we were living under a military dictatorship. Japan, fresh from their victory over Russia, had begun colonizing Korea. Our Emperor Kojong was reduced to the status of King. The same blue sky that entranced me was oppressive to father. For him, nothing would be right and good until Korea was free.

      Here, at market, father, aboji, perceived a very different scene to the one I did. Yangyang had once been fairly rich. Now it was poorer and shabbier. On this Eastern coast, there was bounteous fishing and farming, but the best catch and produce were now skimmed off and profits channelled to the occupying Japanese government in Seoul.

      Our clan, the Min, were the chief landowners of Kangwon Province, our estates straddling what is now both North and South Korea. We had been rulers here for centuries. Over the course of my father’s childhood he had seen our ancestors’ ancient hereditary and honorary titles stripped from us, and for a pittance, we had been forced to sell major land holdings to the Japanese. We were one of the last yangban families to remain in the province. Father felt that we could not leave, so deep were our roots here. Less fortunate landowners and the middle classes suffered the seizure of their land without payment, and those who opposed this were shot by the Japanese. Many had fled to Manchuria and Siberia to avoid impoverishment and Japanese persecution. Only bankrupt commoners and former serfs stayed on.

      The market square was nearly deserted compared to its former self, the grass near the well was overgrown and ragged, even the poets’ stream was now a muddy trickle, drying up in its bed. Japanese officials disguised as Korean peasants roamed the streets of Yangyang for signs of local underground activism, but fooled no one with their blatantly Japanese features, squatter physiques, and pidgin Hangul. But the authorities were correct to be worried about the underground resistance movement. My father and Baby Uncle had that morning been attending an Independence meeting in the ironmonger’s storeroom. Both of them had already been sent to prison once for their efforts.

      Yet naturally, I knew nothing then of my father’s political secrets. The grown-up world was a remote kingdom in the eyes of Korean children. One trusted, accepted, and obeyed the word of parents and elders. This was Confucian law.

      As the rise of a steep hill loomed up before us on the bicycle, I saw that familiar stretch of the road which led to the green gates of our estate; a view that was the most beautiful I have known. The wing-tipped lilt of the tiled roof-gates made my heart swoop upwards, for within the walls of the estate lay what I can only call happiness. Years later, the silhouette of those gates is still scarred in my memory with the burning iron of loss.

      At this point in the road I descended from the bicycle, and walked with my father the rest of the way, shaded by an avenue of gingko trees. Soon the gravel drive forked, and we took the right turning to our farmhouse on the crest of a hill, while the road continued to the left, leading eventually to the grand main house, a mansion, where my eldest uncle, Yong-lae, lived with his family, along with Baby Uncle, who was still a bachelor.

      My grandfather, Lord Min, was now dead. I remember him only slightly, but those impressions cast a giant shadow. He was a splendid, rather mythical figure in his red silk court robes, carried aloft by serfs in his sedan chair. At home, he had been no less awe-inspiring in his high black horsehair hat, with his long white beard and gray silk robes. He moved slowly, and walked with a silver-topped cane, a gift from the King.

      Grandfather had been the last of the jinsas in the family; jinsa was a yangban imperial scholar’s title, now obsolete, bestowed on him by the late King Kojong. Grandfather had been a courtier to the King in Seoul, and was also a distant cousin of the Queen. But Lord Min – Gong-ju was his first name – was too ambitious for the King’s liking. My grandfather’s private armies exceeded the royal quota, and with some relish, the King exiled him to his Northern estate until his death.

      At the time of his marriage, my grandfather had a vivid dream of three birds flying. His wife later gave birth to three sons: Yong-lae (Dragon arriving), Bong-lae – my father (Phoenix arriving), and Gong-lae (Peacock arriving). That he should have had so poetic a premonition was said to be typical of him. He also fathered two daughters, but being female, my aunts had merited no such privileged iconography in my grandfather’s dreams.

      People spoke of Grandfather as if he were a god, and we all were happy enough to go along with the indulgent descriptions. Min Gong-ju was princely, witty, a brilliant scholar of Chinese classics from the age of seven, a formidable poet and horseman, never seen merely riding on his white horse across the fields, always galloping. He was considered a good and merciful feudal lord. As a youth, he had been strikingly handsome: fair and rosy, with liquid hazel eyes and shiny amber-black hair. Noble Manchurian blood accounted for the European features of some of the Min clan. I remember his uproarious laugh, quite terrifying, coming from beneath his towering, solemn black horsehair scholar’s hat.

      But at the end of his life, Grandfather was rarely even seen in public, much less laughing. When he went to the village he wore a Western Homburg low over his eyes so that no one would recognize him, so humiliated was he by the effects of the Japanese occupation, and our family’s disgrace.

      It was Grandfather’s generation that had witnessed the fall of Korea: he had been alive when the rebel army was defeated by the Japanese, and had witnessed the dissolution of the entire Korean Armed Forces by the occupying militia. He had been at Court in Seoul when a group of government ministers had committed mass suicide in protest at Annexation; he had even seen the expression upon the King’s face when the Japanese Declaration was presented to him.

      My grandfather stood by politely as Japanese police ransacked his personal library, confiscating heirloom history books and irreplaceable hand-calligraphed works of Korean poetry and ancient literature which had been declared subversive. Grandfather was made to watch as armed police burned his dearest books in a public bonfire, their wisdom vanishing in a column of destructive black smoke.

      The takeover was a nightmarish echo of the Hideyoshi invasions of the sixteenth century, when Japan had systematically devastated Korea. Arson had been perpetrated on such a scale that virtually no building in Korea not constructed of masonry survived that invasion: even Kyongbok Palace, the royal residence, was burned to the ground, and later had to be rebuilt. All government buildings and royal libraries holding irreplaceable Yi Dynasty records were burned. Thousands of farmers and civilians had been slaughtered and their property destroyed by Japanese troops. The noses of twenty thousand Koreans had been sliced off their faces. Artisans, doctors, and printers had been captured and kidnapped, taken prisoner to Japan for their technological and medical expertise. Although despised and maltreated by the Japanese, they were never allowed to return home to Korea.

      Now the descendants of those Japanese invaders were back in Seoul repeating their public book-burnings – eradicating

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