To Kill a Tiger by Jid Lee

Author:Jid Lee [LEE, JID]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, HIS000000, HIS023000, HIS037070, BIO022000
ISBN: 9781468302844
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Outside Uncle, seated at left, was my mother’s brother and my father’s good friend. He and his feminist sister disappeared in North Korea before I had a chance to meet them.

After the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 through 1953, Rhee’s anticommunist frenzy reached its peak. The war brought to the surface the clashes between the two opposing ideologies—South Korean capitalism and North Korean socialism/communism—and the brutality escalated. Syngman Rhee in South Korea redoubled his campaign to exterminate what remained of the left. Kim Il Sung, in the North, was equally frantic to obliterate the remnants of the right. Unaware of the purge in the North, Outside Uncle boarded a ship to Japan with his sister, my socialist-feminist aunt, to seek refuge in North Korea. They hoped, according to Mother, that the “wind of the blood” in the South would die down in a few years and that they would be able to return home. But for half a century, she heard nothing of or from them. Nobody knew whether they were alive or dead.

“They probably do have children, if they haven’t been condemned to forced labor,” Father said soothingly. What he didn’t say was that Mother’s siblings almost certainly had been called out for their beliefs, that there was a very small chance they hadn’t been persecuted or killed. “If anyone could survive, your sister could. She was a remarkable woman.”

“I just hope they are alive.” I knew she fretted about her siblings’ safety every day.

“If your brother has managed to keep his thoughts to himself, they might be okay. In North Korea, they can condemn you to a life in a gulag for what’s in your mind.”

“South Korea might be a political mess, but North Korea is hell. One slip of the tongue could get you into the coal mines,” Mother said.

“They condemn you for what you think in South Korea, too,” Father said softly. “Do you remember how they arrested my friend Chung Ho for harboring ‘seditious thoughts?’”

I remembered Chung Ho, a tall, lanky middle-aged gentleman who used to visit Father on holidays and chat with him over a Go table. He was one of those few men with whom Father could talk freely about the forbidden subjects, and every now and then the two friends would close the door to engage in a long, confidential conversation. Chung Ho was taken to the basement of the Korean CIA one night, accused of being a threat to national security, and tortured until he lost consciousness. After the agents poured water over his face to wake him up and beat him up again, they released him, pushing his half-dead body in a wheelchair to his wife and two sons waiting outside. On condition that he promise not to instigate communist ideologies and pollute the young minds of Korea, he was allowed to receive treatments at a hospital and to go back to teaching at the university where he was a tenured professor. What remained in my memory, however, was

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