Kim Geung-Ryeol

During the Japanese colonial period he attended Japan’s Military Academy,

became squadron leader

in the Japanese Military Flying Corps.

He fought against the American airborne marines

as an airforce squadron-leader.

He survived aerial warfare.

After Korea was liberated

he disappeared briefly

then turned up at the establishment of the Korean army.

He crossed over

from the hills on the other side to the hills this side.

He became the first Chief of General Staff of the Korean Airforce.

He became a friend of the American military, former enemies.

He became head of the Korean delegation at the UN Command,

the the last Minister of Defence

of Syngman Rhee’s Freedom Party regime.

He used to meet in the evenings with consuls from the American embassy.

He would go for drinks

at the Cheonggu-dong home of the American cultural attaché.

In the morning he went to greet Speaker Yi Gi-bung.

During the day he was summoned to the National Assembly

and bellowed replies to the opposition’s questions.

‘Citizens who demonstrate are insurgents,’ he said.

‘They’re all reds,’ he said.

The opposition assemblymen tore the microphone away.

Once the Syngman Rhee era was over,

he became first chairman

of Park Chung-hee’s Republican Party,

chairman of the Anticommunist League,

a national-constituency assemblyman for the Republican Party,

then proceeded into the world of business,

was active for ten years in the economic sphere.

Later, under the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-Hwan

he became chief vice-chairman

of the Consultative Committee on Peaceful Reunification

before finally becoming Chun Doo-Hwan’s last prime-minister.

And under the Rho Tae-Woo regime

he became a member of the Commission for Korean-Japanese Co-operation.

Such luck! What a long-drawn-out list of government posts!

Such comfort

without a trace of remorse!

How can there be

such a rise in the world

without the least pain?

How can there be

such a vulgar, show-off face

untouched by the bloody, oozing sorrow

of our country’s people?

Shoe-Shine Boy

At the age of fifteen he went out into the world.

Well, really

he didn’t have anything

except the world.

No father.

No mother.

After his father died

his mother went off somewhere and got married.

He lived at a cousin’s house for a while,

then went out into the world.

The world was more comfortable.

The freedom of an empty body in cold winds.

Though he was only fifteen,

his heart was thirty, if not forty.

For a time

he worked for a shoe-shine man

collecting the shoes of regular customers.

After that

he became an apprentice shoe-shine boy.

After forty-one years of shoe shining

he had his own stall at the entrance to a market.

Songs flowed freely from his lips

and he’d polish seventy or eighty pairs of shoes every day.

Then that day came!

He chanced to be caught up in the confusion

along the edge of a demonstration.

‘Hold the election again!

Hold the election again!’

On and on they ran.

His heart was burning. He collapsed.

The twenty-three shoe-shine men of New Masan pooled their money

and held a funeral for their dead comrade.

They even erected a gravestone:

Here sleeps O Seong-won.