The Night His Breath Continued

After her first son was born in 1964, Seoul began to change visibly. The city seemed to breathe faster with each passing year. Construction around City Hall never seemed to stop, and in the Gwanghwamun area, new buildings rose where old ones had been torn down. Roads widened. The sound of streetcars slowly gave way to the horns of cars. Amid the dust of construction sites, people began to use the word development. On the radio, voices spoke every day of economic growth and national plans. Seoul was no longer only a city carrying the wreckage of war. Everyone seemed to be moving. Poverty was still everywhere, but it no longer felt completely motionless. In every alley, a faint expectation began to seep in—the thought that perhaps life might someday become better. But Gyu’s days still remained inside a single rented room. She cooked rice while holding the baby, saved every piece of coal, and calculated each day carefully. The two daughters she had left in the countryside remained in a corner of her heart. Her eldest daughter was now old enough to attend elementary school, and she and the second daughter were growing up in the rural village, surrounded by fields and seasons. In the mornings, they swept the yard with their grandfather and helped their grandmother draw water. They grew in a different time, at a different speed from the city. Gyu was relieved by that fact. And hurt by it. It was fortunate that the girls did not have to know the poverty of Seoul’s single-room life. But the absence of their mother remained inside her like a bruise. In 1966, Gyu gave birth again. It was another son. But joy quickly turned into fear. The baby was not healthy. His cry was weak, and his breathing was thin. People shook their heads, and somewhere deep in her heart, Gyu had already begun to let him go. That night, she placed the baby on the warm floor heated by the coal beneath it. Just in case. She did not know whether he was still alive, or whether his breath had already stopped. The room was silent. Gyu did not sleep. She waited for the child’s breathing. That day was long. It felt as if it would never end. But the child survived. The next day, a faint but unmistakable breath continued. Gyu said nothing. She did not cry. She simply took the child back into her arms. And so the family grew by one more. He was a child for whom the fact of being alive was already enough. Around that time, her husband’s life also began to change. After years as a civil servant, he was slowly finding his place. He was not a man who pushed himself forward loudly, but he did his work faithfully and gradually earned the trust of those around him. People began to speak of promotion. Within the organization, his name came to be associated with steadiness. As her husband built his position as a civil servant, the atmosphere of the household changed little by little. They were still not comfortable, but life had become stable enough to think about tomorrow. Gyu accepted that change without many words. Life always improved one step later than she needed it to. She did not blame it for being late. Seoul continued to change. The area around Gwanghwamun became more orderly, and the plaza in front of City Hall became a stage for national events. The center of the city grew larger and stronger. But Gyu’s life still rested on the warmth of a child’s body, the smell of cooked rice, and the faces of her two daughters in the countryside. She knew that none of these changes would save her overnight. Yet the children were alive. Her husband was finding his place. Her two daughters in the countryside were crossing season after season and growing. That alone gave life enough reason to continue. So Gyu moved slowly through her own time alongside Seoul’s development. The city was growing upward. Her life was hardening quietly from below. In those days, Gyu’s household was the poor home of an ordinary low-paid civil servant. Her husband’s salary envelope was always thin, and as the end of the month approached, it seemed to grow even lighter. Still, because he was a civil servant, people called him a man with stable work. But that stability existed only in words and in ledgers. Their real life stood on constant calculation. The morning began with coal briquettes. Before dawn, Gyu was the first to wake and change the briquette. With metal tongs, she moved the black coal, shook off the falling powder, and held her breath as she lit the match. If the fire did not catch well, the day somehow felt longer from the start. When rice began boiling in the aluminum pot placed over the briquette fire, a faint warmth finally spread through the room. With that single fire, she cooked rice, heated water, and warmed the floor. Side dishes were always simple. Most days, there was a small dish of soy-braised beans and kimchi on the table. When there were even a few dried anchovies, the children welcomed them as if it were a feast. In front of the children, Gyu acted as if nothing was wrong and served their rice. But inside, she was always calculating the next meal. Should she give them a little more now? Or save some for dinner? Those questions repeated themselves many times a day. The children did not fully understand the situation. Her first son ran outside as soon as he finished eating, turning the alley into his playground. The younger one sat beside the coal stove with paper spread in front of him, drawing pictures. Inside the room, the smell of coal smoke mixed with the smell of pencil lead. Quietly, the child created his own world. The room was narrow, and the ceiling was low. But the children’s days still grew inside it. At night, the single room became even smaller. Where the dining table had been during the day, bedding was spread out, and everyone lay down in the same direction. Gyu checked again and again to make sure the coal fire would not go out. Then she lowered the flame and blocked the cracks around the window. The room felt suffocating. But nothing was more frightening than the cold. When the children’s breathing became even, relief finally came over her. Another day had passed safely. Her husband often returned late to that room. Outside, as he adjusted to his life as a civil servant, his face seemed to carry a little more ease. But the moment he opened the door, he became the head of the household again. He did not speak much. They did not share long stories about the hardships of the day. They simply laid down their separate exhaustion in the same room, under the same blanket. Poverty had seeped silently into the house. Still, daily life continued inside it. Like rice over a coal briquette fire, they lived carefully, trying not to boil over, trying not to burn. Inside that single room, they endured day by day under the name of family. In the spring of 1972, her eldest son entered elementary school without a school uniform. It was not an age when every child wore a neat new uniform like today. Gyu simply chose the most decent clothes among what they already had at home. She folded and sewed the trousers. Under fluorescent light, the shirt looked a little faded. But the child did not seem bothered by the clothes. What bothered him was school itself. From the night before entrance day, he became strangely quiet. Normally, he would have begged to go outside and play. But that night, he only wriggled under the blanket. Gyu asked for no reason, “Do you not want to go to school?” Instead of answering, the child buried his head deeper under the blanket. He looked like someone facing the greatest event in the world. By morning, the problem became clearer. When Gyu tried to put the school bag on his back, he pulled away as if she were loading him with a heavy burden. “I want to stay home.” His voice was firm. He did not even know exactly what school was, but instinctively he seemed to understand that it was a place where freedom became smaller. For a child who loved running outside, being told to sit at a desk must have felt like punishment. Gyu coaxed him, joked with him, and somehow pulled him as far as the front door. Even as he watched the neighborhood children gathering one by one to go to school, he dragged his feet. For every step forward, he looked back twice. By the time they reached the end of the alley, he was almost being pulled along. At the school gate, he made his final resistance. He clung tightly to Gyu’s hand and refused to let go. His face was solemn, as if he were being dragged to a battlefield. Holding back laughter, Gyu gently loosened his fingers. “Everyone goes here. You are not the only one.” At those words, the child dropped his shoulders as if sighing and walked through the school gate. On the way home, Gyu laughed to herself. He had disliked school so much, but after only a few days, he began attending as if nothing had happened. He still had no uniform, and his bag was worn, but he adapted quickly among the other children. Elementary school was a small beginning in the child’s life. For the family, it was one more responsibility. Looking back later, those dragging footsteps would remain as a memory mixed with laughter. It was the moment when a freedom-loving child first made a compromise with the world. Her eldest son was not a particularly brilliant child. It was rare to see him sitting with a book open, and he was not quick to understand problems. Instead, he had more energy for running around all day than anyone else. As soon as he opened his eyes in the morning, he thought about going outside. Only near sunset did he return home, covered in dust. He had little talent for looking after his younger brother. Whether the younger child cried at home or not, his attention was always fixed on neighborhood friends and older boys. If Gyu looked away for even a moment, he had already slipped out of the alley. Only much later would she learn where he had been and what he had done. His daily routine was almost always the same. The moment he dropped his school bag, he headed for Yaksuteo Mountain. To him, Yaksuteo Mountain was both a playground and a secret base. He squeezed between the women and grandmothers who came to draw spring water, then climbed higher with the older boys, climbing trees, throwing stones, and spending hours as if time did not exist. When he came home, his knees were always scraped, and his clothes were never clean. Gyu scolded him every day, but each time he only smiled as if it were no great matter. In those days, elementary schools were overflowing with children. There were so many students in each class that schools had to divide them into morning and afternoon sessions. Classrooms were full to the brim, and teachers seemed too overwhelmed to carefully watch over every child’s learning. Children who studied well naturally stood out. Those who did not were swallowed by the crowd. Gyu sometimes visited the school. She went to speak with the teacher about her son. In today’s words, people might have called it a mother’s excessive involvement. But it did not come from ambition. It came from the fact that, as his mother, she could not simply ignore that her son was not as sharp as others. Could the teacher perhaps pay him a little more attention? What could she help with at home? Gyu asked carefully. It was not easy to sit before the teacher and say such things. It hurt to admit that her child might be falling behind. At the same time, if she did nothing, she felt she would be even more sorry. Her son was a child who learned the world with his body more than with books. Gyu knew this. Still, somewhere in her heart, she wanted him to at least keep up with others. Her son grew that way, running up and down Yaksuteo Mountain. He was slow in study, but fearless in meeting the world. Gyu’s efforts were not the ambition of a mother trying to push her child ahead of everyone else. They were the struggle of a mother trying to hold him back from falling behind. In those days, she lived by pushing and holding the child’s back at the same time. That day, too, the boy headed straight for Yaksuteo Mountain. As soon as he threw down his school bag, he shoved his feet into his worn sneakers and ran out through the alley without even turning back at his mother’s call. His mind was filled only with thoughts of the secret hideout near the mountain’s upper slope and the neighborhood older boys waiting there. The mountain path was a familiar playground to him. He ran up the slope, kicking up dust, stepping over crooked pine roots that stuck out of the ground. Halfway up, the spring was crowded as always with neighborhood women and grandmothers drawing water. The boy slipped through them and hurried higher. The adults called after him. “Be careful!” “Do not run!” But the words never reached his ears. When he arrived at the hideout, the older boys were already there, throwing stones and playing. He joined them happily, losing all sense of time under the high sun. They fought with tree branches as swords and competed to see who could throw stones the farthest. Soon his knees were scraped again, and his clothes were stained with dirt and grass. After a long time, the sun began to lean down behind the mountain. When the evening light turned red, hunger finally came to him, and he sensed that it was time to go home. He shouted to the older boys that he would see them tomorrow and ran back down the path. When he arrived home, dinner was already set in the yard. Gyu sighed first when she saw him covered in dirt again. “Can you not get through even one day quietly? Do you love that mountain so much?” She poured out her scolding, but the child only sat before the meal with a bright smile. His eyes shone as he rambled on about all the exciting things that had happened on the mountain. As Gyu applied red medicine to his scraped knees, she thought to herself. Even if he had no interest in studying, perhaps learning the world with his whole body was not such a bad thing. She only hoped that the process would not be too rough. That night, the child fell asleep deeply. Watching his sleeping face, Gyu prayed that he would one day walk bravely toward a world as wide as Yaksuteo Mountain. One day, the child’s footsteps sounded unusually light. As soon as her eldest son came home from school, before he even took off his shoes, he spoke. “Mother, I need to bring a plant seed to school tomorrow.” The sentence was short. But a part of Gyu’s heart quietly sank. There were no beans in the house. There were certainly no red beans. There had been a time when even a handful of grain could speak for a household’s circumstances. Now, the fact that even that handful was missing became painfully clear. Without a word, Gyu went out into the yard. In one corner of the house, a small corn sprout was growing tenderly under the spring sun. Her fingers felt strangely heavy as she dug into the soil. The small sprout, pulled up by the roots, went into the child’s school bag in place of a seed. The next evening, her son was quiet. After hesitating for a long while, he finally spoke as if swallowing tears. “Mother, I do not know why I said I had brought a seed.” In his eyes were shame and confusion he could not explain. Gyu could say nothing. After that day, the child became quieter. He began to forget how to raise his hand. That was when Gyu first understood that confidence did not grow easily just because one wished it to. Her youngest son was different. He spoke little, but he spent long hours holding a pencil. On paper, he was always drawing the faces of girls. Faces that smiled. Faces that cried. Without needing to ask why, Gyu could see that the child was growing himself inside those drawings. The children began to grow in their own ways. One child became silently smaller. Another quietly built a world of his own. Watching them, Gyu understood. Poverty did not end with hunger. It remained somewhere inside the hearts of children for a long time. And the corn sprout she had pulled from the yard that day stayed in her memory, never planted again. Because her timid eldest son always stayed on her mind, Gyu wanted to do something for him, even within their limited means. She did not want him to fall behind in his studies. So she decided to send him to a shabby house in Bondong, where a female teacher was said to teach neighborhood children. There were only a few desks and a blackboard. By today’s standards, it was less a private academy than a small neighborhood study room. But her eldest son did not think of it as a place to study. He went back and forth every day, met friends, and after class ran through the alleys. Studying was only one part of play, not something that stayed long in his head. Gyu felt frustrated, but she could not bring herself to press him too hard. In those days, for elementary school children, play came before study. If there was something good to eat, that alone was the greatest joy. By then, his younger brother had also entered elementary school. The second son was intelligent, resembling his father. He was quiet, with clear eyes, and often competed for first or second place in class. He was different from his older brother in personality, appearance, and study. Watching the two boys, Gyu felt that although they had come from the same womb, they were growing along entirely different roads. Her eldest son, however, had unusual luck with food. He loved the soybean paste pickles made by the landlord’s family so much that he could almost finish an entire jar in a day. A bottle of Seoul Milk a day was basic for him. He wandered the alleys eating silkworm pupae from a paper cup with his fingers. One day, following Gyu to Bondong Market, he squatted on the ground for half a day chewing garlic stems. As long as his stomach was full, he had no worries in the world. Because he loved playing so much, hardly a day passed without some incident. Once, while pushing a toy truck and running, the wheels caught on a paving block. He fell forward and badly injured his head. Blood poured out as if by the bowlful. Gyu rushed him to the neighborhood clinic, where his head had to be stitched without anesthesia. The child cried. Gyu clenched her teeth and stood holding his hand. Before that scar had fully settled, another accident happened about a year later. After playing outside, he became thirsty and put his mouth directly to the tap to drink. He slipped and struck his head again on the cement floor, which was nearly as high as he was. Another wound. Another stitch. Another scar. So her eldest son grew with marks on his body. He was slow in study and simple in thought, but he ate well, ran well, and grew. Whenever Gyu looked at his scars, she felt worry and relief at the same time. The world was rough. The alleys of Seoul in the 1970s were not safe places for children. But within that roughness, the child was surviving in his own way. Some children grew through study. Some children grew through scars. Gyu could only hope that each of her children would not collapse on the road given to them.