The Aquariums of Pyongyang_ Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag - Chol-hwan Kang [11]
In the 1930s, though, life on the island was very difficult. Much of the population emigrated to Japan, to find work at the center of the colonial empire to which Korea had belonged since 1910.
Grandmother was the third daughter in a poor household, where a typical meal consisted of sweet potatoes, occasionally accompanied by fish. At age thirteen, she left the island for Japan. It seems she was an intelligent child. She told me with a laugh that when she was young her father always said, “Ah, if you’d been a boy, you really could have been somebody.”
She set out on her own, intending to find work in a textile factory in Kyoto. As it turned out, she came up an inch or so short. The factory owners weren’t allowed to hire anyone under the age of thirteen, and since girls never had any identification papers, factory owners had to judge age solely on the basis of height. A bit short for her age, my grandmother was told to come back after she had grown a little. Still, she didn’t want to go back to Korea. She begged in the streets for a time and slept in the factory dormitory, where a few workers from back home had taken her under their wing. She told me most of her food came from poulterers, who gave her the chicken heads their customers didn’t want. I have the impression that wasn’t the worst of it, either. She lived that way for a year, until she grew another inch or two and was hired by the factory. The work was hard, but she liked it. She was proud to earn her first wages and shortly repaid the girls who had helped her out. What little money was left over she sent back home to her family.
The Socialist movement was gaining ground in Japan, especially among teachers. So it is no surprise that Grandmother was first introduced to the ideas of socialism by her night school instructor. My grandmother was a bright student, attentive, curious, quick to learn. Several of her teachers grew attached to her and, through their discussions, tried to direct the young, upright girl toward socialism.
She joined the Japanese Communist Party at age twenty, which was around the same time she met her husband-to-be, who was, like her, a native of Cheju. The oldest of three children, he had set out for Japan to extricate himself from an ill-begotten marriage arranged by his parents. He was fifteen years old at the time, his wife about the same. The two young people never loved each other, and the marriage quickly proved a failure. Eventually my grandfather decided to run away, leaving his wife back home with his parents. According to Confucian tradition, which continues to hold sway in present-day Korea, a married woman belongs to her husband’s family and remains so, irrespective of divorce or separation. If she tries to return to her parents’ home, she will most likely be turned away.
My grandfather had a more auspicious landing in Japan than did my grandmother. Within a short time, he found work in a jeweler’s shop and learned gold plating. After quickly mastering the technique, he established his own shop to manufacture novelty jewelry. About that time he met my grandmother. The man who wanted to make a fortune and the woman who wanted to make revolution fell in love and married. My father was their first child. In 1934, the couple traveled back to Cheju and moved in with my grandfather’s family, a step that may shock the Western mindset, but that was not at all rare in Korea. The first wife had no choice but silently to endure the presence of the new wife under the same roof.
Their return was short-lived. My grandparents soon were on their way back to Japan. In the meantime, however, Grandmother made the best of her sojourn on