Enemy Green / Dasom Yang
Image by Dasom Yang
1. The Bad Side
My country is small, smaller still since it’d been halved. A peninsula in the shape of a leaping tiger I was told, in school, from TV, in textbooks. I disagreed, thought the image was, while romantic, a laughable stretch of imagination. I thought my country looked more like spilled water than a leaping tiger. Because on the map all countries are in fact shaped like water, spilling still, becoming oceans, inch by inch.
When I grew up in the 90s, Korea’s west side was the bad side because it was ugly. Its beaches had large intertidal zones and its water was shallow and muddy. And like the gap between ebb and flow, its people were fast, mercurial. Loud-mouthed, hot-tempered; in or out, no in-between. The muddy beaches were fertile, ideal for robust marine wildlife and fishing. The fertility extended inland, creating towns with mineral-rich soil and prosperous agriculture. It also meant that the west coast stank of the sea, of its yellow muddy water. It was too fertile, too earthly, for its people to pursue a life of sophistication, of intellect, of the new kind of abundance, the kind that owes little to nature, but comes from human artifice like tactics and crafts.
So when industrialisation and urbanisation caught on in the Korean peninsula, the West Coasters didn’t keep up. Owning acres of farmland and big fishing boats ceased to equate to wealth. It pointed to an antiquity, a provincial life that might keep food on the table but not much else—no school, no education, no lawyers and doctors in the family, no buildings in neighbourhoods where charging astronomical rent would become a sport. Just food. Really good food. Steamy bowls of the year’s first harvest of rice, ceramic jars of rank Kimchi fermented with oysters, fresh-caught mackerels, and crisp grilled sauries whose backs were blue, resistant to the yellow seawater they had spent their lives in.
The east side was the good side because it was beautiful—lined vertically by veins of tall mountains, sinuous like history. Seoraksan was the highest mountain in mainland South Korea, after Baekdusan in North Korea and Hallasan in Jeju Island, both volcanic mountains wearing caldera lakes on their heads like scholarly hats. Seoraksan wasn’t volcanic. It never spewed ash or magma. The only seismic thing about it was its beauty throughout the changing seasons: quiet and patient in winter, full in bloom with Jindallae and Chulzuk in spring, screaming green in summer, and in autumn—in autumn the mountain was devastated and devastating, the maples bleeding crimson, the ginkgos losing golden leaves like drunken gamblers.
It was my family’s yearly outing, going hiking in the Seorak National Park in October; not all the way up to Daechungbong, the top peak, but about halfway to Hundulbawi, the Rocking Rock, where a boulder the size of a small house sat at the edge of a cliff, easily moved by human force but never falling off. On our hike down, we would take the less trodden path, among the trees, feeling the cushion of dead leaves beneath our feet. My sister and I never paced ourselves by our parents; we always lagged behind or rushed ahead, collecting freshly fallen leaves like they were money. They were tender and moist along their veins, not unlike our own young palms. We would pile them into a fat stack until we couldn’t hold any more, until there was enough of them to dissipate the brittle autumn sun when we threw them in the air and watched them fall.
2. 적산가옥Jeoksan Gaok
We moved to Gunsan, a small town on the West Coast, when I was eight. For as long as I could remember we had lived in Incheon, a city also on the West Coast, but a metropolis, big enough to drain the sea out of its people. It was only when we moved to Gunsan that I realised what people meant about the west side being the bad side. The town was small, rural, and stank of the shallow sea.
It was also the site of an ugly, uncomfortable history. Because the West Coast was the functional coast, abundant with natural resources and close to China, many of its cities had been taken over by the Japanese during their colonisation of Korea. They built several industrial ports on Gunsan’s shore to export exploited crops and goods. Many Japanese officials and merchants bought property in the city and moved there with their families. After the loss of the war and their unconditional surrender, most of the colonialists went back to their island, leaving behind their traditional Japanese houses.
Koreans called them 적산가옥Jeoksan Gaok—Enemy Houses. Many of them were destroyed during the Korean War, but afterwards the government preserved some of them, most famously the Hirosu Manor, the luxurious former home of a Japanese lumber merchant. Some of the less extravagant houses had been bought off or simply taken over by the locals when they were abruptly vacated, and had been inhabited ever since, most of their original exteriors still intact despite sporadic renovations.
3. Enemy Green
In this sea-rank city whose yellow beaches were lined with enemy houses, the only thing I loved was my mother. She would often take me to the big fish market at the port, telling me this was where life happened, careless and original. Herself from Daegu, a prosperous city on the East Coast, she was the only thing at the market that didn’t smell like salt and sea creatures. She had bright, pale skin that seemed immune to change, and wore brave white clothes to the fish market. And I was small, small and irrelevant. The sight and the smell of the market repelled me. I told her that if life meant developing your own stench, then I didn’t want it. Now I see how wrong I was. Not about the meaning of life, but about not wanting it because of its stark nature: this would be the exact reason why I would want it, want it all the more for it. She saw my error then too, only I couldn’t tell because her smile was generous and her words were scarce. But she knew, and that’s why we went back every weekend.
‘I wonder why they kept that colour,’ she said one evening on our way back from the market. Near sundown, the port wasn’t crowded. The fishmongers were retiring home, collecting the remainder of their products, loading their carts and foldable chairs onto their mini Bongo trucks. On our right were the small fishing boats parked near the dock, rocking to the rhythm of water whose foam from a distance looked like iridescent pearls. On our left were the sun-stained houses facing the sea, walls weathered and softened with salt.
I followed my mother’s gaze toward the Enemy Houses, their steep, black roofs and green gates. I asked what she meant.
‘I mean the green on their gates. That dull green. Reminds me of the desks at city register offices. I’m not a fan.’
The steel gates of the Enemy Houses were all painted the same pale green, though parts of their metal surfaces had chipped off to reveal earthy rust.
‘Why the green?’
‘Well,’ she walked, shifting a bag from her left hand to her right to maintain balance. ‘As the Japanese started leaving, Koreans took over the houses… Some of them had been former servants, some neighbours. The trouble was, the locals decided to take revenge on the colonialists by burning their houses at night.’
‘With people in them?’
‘I think that was the point, yes.’
Suddenly the smell of fish was much more carnal.
‘But they didn’t take into account the Koreans who took over. Only after killing several families did they come up with a way to distinguish empty houses, or the ones still occupied by the Japanese.’
‘What did they do?’
I held onto her sleeve.
‘They told the Koreans to paint those gates green.’
She stopped, shook her arm to loosen my grip. You’re making me lose balance, she said gently.
‘So that they’d know which houses still had Koreans in them and which didn’t,’ she continued. ‘But we had only just regained independence and the whole country was impoverished and…’
‘But why the green?’
‘Oh, mostly because green was the only paint they had. It’s the colour of the army. And the Japanese military had left some behind.’
‘But that’s not really the army green.’
‘Exactly. Because the military paint wasn’t enough. So they mixed it with white clothes dye, or with water. And there you go.’
She stared at the house. My mother was a thinker and a reader. When she wasn’t busy taking care of house chores, she was reading, books, magazines, various newspapers, advert flyers, anything with words on them. But what struck me were the moments when I caught her lying on her floor mat surrounded by reading materials, not reading, just thinking. I liked watching her like that; she seemed incorporeal, defined by her thoughts, not her actions. I liked that a person could not do a thing and still be so much. I liked believing that the same current that charged her mind and allowed her to exist outside her body ran in me. I felt proud to have come from someone so special.
She had the same enigmatic, thoughtful expression on her face looking at the house. I knew her thoughts ran deep and unhurried, but now I was afraid they travelled on without me.
‘Did it work?’
‘What? Oh, well, I guess.’
She paused.
‘I don’t know why they keep the colour on until now, though. After all these years.’
‘How do you know this story, Mom?’
She looked down at me. She looked surprised.
‘My father told me.’
She never talked about her parents. For holidays we visited an old lady she called Aunt that we were supposed to call Grandmother. She was a vivacious woman who ran a Yukgejang restaurant by herself in a small town near Gunsan, who upon seeing us would give me and my sister 5,000-won bills to spend at the supermarket next door. The two of us would then play a little game, each buying different candies and trinkets without sparing a dime or going over, and comparing who spent the money better. Short curly hair dyed jet-black, eyes big and unblinking as if in constant suspicion, Grandmother bore no resemblance to my mother. They were friendly to each other, but too friendly to be family. At the back of the restaurant Grandmother kept a neat pile of Buddhist bibles, one of which was called Bulja-jisongkyung, which sounded awfully similar to a vulgarity for the male part, and never failed to make my sister and me giggle until we left. Maybe it was all the sweets, maybe it was the unfortunately named scripture, but I never could remember how my mother said goodbye to her aunt.
She didn’t continue, neither the story nor the walk. In her stillness, the harbor seemed to enlarge. I felt lost, threatened by the depths of her own thoughts, all of their unknowability; by how much I loved her regardless.
‘Here, let me hold that,’ I said, snatching a bag from her hand. It was wet and heavy, its thin plastic handles sunk into the flesh of my hand as it swung. She laughed.
‘What are you doing, honey? There’s no need. Here, give it back.’
‘No!’ I said, running ahead of her playfully, relieved to hear her sounding normal.
‘Hey, alright, then. Here, take this one. It’s lighter.’
I looked back and there she was, hair shining with a touch of auburn under the setting sun, shaking her head in joyous disbelief, her laugh bare and real.
‘Mom, you’re going to live forever, right?’ I said, taking the bag that she handed me. Without an answer, she switched all the bags to her left so she could hold my hand.
A pair of seagulls flew by us into the horizon. We watched them become ripples against the sky, where the sun slouched toward its natural home. And to the east there was no good, to the west there was no bad: only the sea.