hankyoreh

Kim Soon-hye, an 82-year-old resident of the Yeondong neighborhood in Jeju City, is a disabled survivor of the Jeju April 3 incident of 1948–49 who carried two pieces of shrapnel in her body for 48 years. Deep, permanent scars remain on her right thigh and back. The wounds may have healed over the course of 70 years, but the visible scars give a hint of the suffering she experienced “that day.”

On the afternoon of Dec. 17, I joined Kim on a visit to Seotgurinjil in the Ora #2 neighborhood of Jeju Township, the place where she had been living at the time. Urban development had erased any trace of how things looked on that day, but her recollection was clear. Standing on a sloping roadside, she pointed out different locations with her cane as she recalled the events.

As twilight fell one day in early November 1947, Kim and her younger brother San-seok (now 80) went into the field west of their house to herd up the cattle there. The Kim family had five of the animals at the time.

“My brother had gone down to block the path, and I had gone up and was just heading toward the field where the cows were to herd them up,” she remembered. Just then, she saw two young men running up the road below. “Looks like they’re racing,” she thought to herself. Then she heard a hissing sound. At that moment, something slammed into her body. Her memory stops there.

Awaking after a mortar shell blast

It was the day the punitive anti-communist forces set fire to the village of Yeondong (now Sinjeju). Soldiers from the 9th Regiment had fired a mortar after they spotted some young men at a location just over a kilometer from Doryeongmoru (now Sinjeju Ipgu Junction). The shell had landed on a large boulder next to the road, and shrapnel from it struck Kim and embedded itself in her body. She was 12 years old at the time. Her brother Moon-seok, two years her junior, ran home to tell her older siblings, but they were too terrified to leave the house. Neighbors passing by the fields told the family, “We saw your daughter dead by the roadside.”

Reviving some time after losing consciousness, Kim crawled over and sat against a watering furrow west of the road. She tried to touch her work pants and found blood puddled there at the crotch on the right side. Feeling chills in her back, she reached there with her hand, and the fingers poked inside. It was then that she realized she had been hit by something. The shell’s shrapnel had dug into the 12-year-old girl’s right thigh and back.

As darkness fell, her oldest brother Du-seok (then 24) came looking for her. Seeing her, he rushed over. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“I don’t know where I’m hurt,” she answered. “There’s blood all over my leg and blood coming out of my back.”

Weeping, her brother lifted her up on his back and raced home. It was around 7 to 8 pm by then.

Kim’s mother agonized at the sight of her daughter.

“I can’t even see. I depend on her to survive,” she cried. “What am I going to do if she dies?” At the time, Kim’s mother was almost completely blind. Two of her father’s friends crafted a stretcher from tree branches and a sack and took her to the Jeju Provincial Clinic, a little over an hour away.

Her mother walked through the night, clinging to the stretcher. As she passed the village of Ora, she had to plead with the soldiers guarding the wall that circled the village before she was allowed through. Kim’s father and brothers were too afraid of being captured by the soldiers to even consider leaving the house. The clinic was closed, and they travelled to the nearby Sipja (Cross) Clinic, where Kim underwent surgery the following day. The wounds never healed completely, but she returned home after 21 days because of her father and older brothers.

Dec. 16th marked the 70th anniversary of her oldest brother’s death. He had found a house in Yeondong and set a wedding date – but after going out to sow barley seeds on “that day,” he never returned.

Kim’s two brothers taken away

Dec. 11, 1948, was her grandfather’s birthday. After eating his birthday breakfast with the family, he sent Kim’s oldest brother and second-oldest brother Il-seok (then 17) to sow barley seeds. Below the house was a field known as Jugeulwat. Just then, the sound of gunshots rang out, and soldiers swarmed over the village. They claimed to have seen two “rebels” running from Yeondong toward Ora.

Finding Kim’s two brothers returning from sowing seeds, the soldiers dragged them into a field next to the house. They proceeded to summon the other residents. “We’ve caught the rebels. We want everyone to come out and have a look,” they said. Kim’s mother and father were also present, but they were unable to step forward.

“My father thought they’d kill the whole family if he said they were his sons, so he couldn’t say anything,” Kim recalled.

The soldiers fired blank rounds. “Tell us the truth. Are you rebels or not?” they pressed.

“My oldest brother was a bit older and stayed silent, but my second brother was still young. He was shaking and weeping, crying, ‘Grandmother, help me.’ They still fired their guns and took my brothers away to ‘kill some rebels.’ My father could only watch them, petrified. He couldn’t say they were his sons.”

As the soldiers tied her grandsons’ hands behind their backs and began marching them away, the grandmother ran after them. “They aren’t rebels,” she pleaded. “They’re the grandsons I took in. They’re just coming from sowing the barley seeds and now you’re taking them away.” On their way to Yeondong, the soldiers stopped at the village of Yeonmi and told the grandmother they would give back the second brother, but demanded that she stop following them. She returned home with only Kim’s second brother.

Dazed, she told them, “They took my oldest grandson and said they would spare this one. They said they’d kill the both of them if I didn’t take him, so I brought him back.” Shortly afterwards, she left the house again. “I need to go see where they took my oldest grandson,” she said.

The place they had taken him was Sajangbat, next to the Yeondong public hall. He was already dead by the time she arrived. After using her skirt to cover his face, she began rolling on the ground and standing up again in agony, over and over. She seemed to have lost her wits.

At home, she continued rolling on the floor and bellowing. “They killed him. They shot him with their guns,” she cried. “What am I going to do?”

“My grandmother was so grief-stricken she could have died,” Kim recalled.

It was a cold day with flurries of snow. The soldiers who had taken Kim’s older brother had apparently summoned residents to the public hall. Because of a boil on his chin, his faced was wrapped in a white rag, tied like a bridle. With one of the leather belts that had been used by the Japanese military, the soldiers bound his arms to his neck behind his match; his face turned black, and he was unable to breath. The soldiers kicked him down to the floor numerous times. When he finally stopped moving, they shot him. This was the account the grandmother heard from residents in Yeondong. Kim’s future husband Yang Chi-bu (now deceased) was one of the witnesses that day. Her father-in-law also lost his life at Mokpo Detention Center during the Jeju Uprising of April 3.

After the soldiers withdrew, residents transported the brother’s body to an empty field next to the house before laying him to rest at Jugeulwat. Kim’s youngest brother Moon-seok, then seven, died the following year, trampled by a cow while being carried to Jungsangan on his fleeing older brother’s back.

Living with an unknown injury

Kim did not even know about her injury until the age of 23, when she met her husband and moved to Yeondong. Crops were poor in the wake of the Apr. 3 Jeju Massacre, and she began cutting firewood to take into the city and sell. A full A-frame of firewood earned her around 1.8 liters of unhulled barley, which she would grind with a millstone and eat as a mash. She and her husband worked nonstop. But after giving birth to her sixth child, she began experiencing unexplained chest pains. More and more, she found herself unable to sleep at night.

When she went to the hospital, she was told they were cold symptoms. The doctors prescribed her cold medicine, and she assumed their diagnosis was correct. The medicine did make the pain stop, but it would start hurting again as it wore off. She also had several traditional healing rites performed, but there was no improvement. In 1994, she underwent an X-ray at a hospital in downtown Jeju, and a foreign object was discovered in her lung. The hospital told her it was cancer. Despairing at the news, she went to another hospital. This time she was told it wasn’t cancer. Clinging to hope, she visited a university hospital in Seoul. The doctor examining her asked about the scar on her back.

“I was hit with shrapnel when I was 12 years old,” she explained.

Concluding that the [foreign object] was likely a piece of shrapnel, the doctor operated on her. This was Oct. 1995. The doctor ended up removing two thumbnail-sized fragments that had been embedded in her lungs.

“How could someone have shrapnel in their body for 47 years?” the doctor marveled.

The terror Kim experienced in her childhood followed her throughout her life.

“I would be startled whenever my husband came back home from going out. It was to the point where I told him to make noise on purpose when he moved around,” she said. “I just kept living with the fear.”

“When it happened, all I could think was, ‘Am I dead?’ I never imagined I would live this way. Life is a tenacious thing when a person wants to live. I’ve survived because I’m alive.”

By Huh Ho-joon, Jeju correspondent

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