myself? I mentally rehearsed my lines in Korean and then pressed the button. A buzzer sounded deep inside the recesses of the residence. I waited. After a minute, I pushed again. It took three tries until a sleepy voice buzzed back through the intercom.
“Nugu ya?” Who is it?
A woman’s voice. Not Madame Chon. At least I didn’t think so. I phrased my Korean as precisely as I was able.
“I wish to speak to Chon Un-suk’s mother. It’s about the American woman MP. I’m still looking for her and I need help.”
I emphasized the words “Miguk yoja honbyong.” American woman MP.
There was no answer. But the woman hadn’t switched off. The intercom buzzed steadily like a broken transmission from the nether realms.
“What’d she say?” Ernie asked.
“She didn’t say anything. I think that’s the maid. She’s probably gone to fetch Madame Chon.”
“I hope the hell she hurries.” Ernie wrapped his nylon jacket more tightly around his chest. “It’s cold out here.” Our blue jeans, our sneakers, our T-shirts, and our nylon jackets were soaked from rolling in spilled water at fish heaven. Our overnight bags were back at the yoguan. They were history now because it would be too risky to go back for them. As we’d wandered through the back alleys of Tongduchon, searching for the Chon residence, our clothing had been further dampened by sporadic rain. As I’d suspected, the “sweetness” had long since gone out of the precipitation. Now the rain spurted from low-moving clouds, punching us when we least expected it, like a boxer softening us up with a left jab.
Finally, the intercom buzzed back to life.
“Nugu seiyo?” A softer voice. Sweeter. With the polite verb endings of a woman of culture.
“Nanun Mipalkun,” I said. I’m from 8th Army.
I went on to remind her that we had talked to her before about our search for Corporal Jill Matthewson and we’d run into some problems and we needed to talk to her and, quite frankly, we needed shelter from the rain and maybe something to eat.
“You haven’t found Jill yet?” she asked.
The reproach of the rich. Everything should be convenient. Simple.
“Not yet,” I replied.
There was another long silence. Then, like a jolt of lightning, a different buzzer sounded and the small wooden door in the main gate popped open. Without hesitation, Ernie and I ducked through.
The refuge provided by Madame Chon was sweeter than I had hoped. Hot baths were drawn for us by the old housemaid, a nourishing meal of turnip soup and steamed rice was served, and then a good night’s sleep on cotton mats with thick silk comforters in a private room. In fact, Ernie and I wallowed in comfort too long and it was almost ten a.m. when we left the warm confines of the Chon residence.
The maid had dried and pressed our clothes. I felt as fresh as a newly minted ten thousand won note.
Outside in a narrow alley, a young woman walked in front of us. She had already warned us sternly not to follow too closely and not to indicate in any way that we knew her. Of course, we didn’t know her. We didn’t even know her name. This morning she had appeared in the Chon family courtyard, bowing to Madame Chon. She was a slender young woman, probably in her early twenties, wearing blue jeans and sandals and a red-and-blue patterned blouse; her brown hair was just a little shaggier than a school girl’s pageboy cut. We weren’t given her name but Madame Chon told us to follow her.
Last night, in talking to Madame Chon, it became apparent to me that one area of Jill Matthewson’s activities that we hadn’t investigated was Jill’s participation in the demonstrations outside the main gate of Camp Casey. Jill had come to apologize to the Chon family for the actions of her compatriots and to say how saddened she was at the untimely death of their daughter. It took a lot of guts for an American MP to do that. And you can bet that the 2nd Division provost marshal didn’t approve of any such apology. The U.S. military is always loathe to take responsibility for mistakes. Jill had done it on her own. When she arrived, some of the demonstration organizers had been there, too. Jill was introduced to them and they began to talk.
“Later,” Madame Chon told me, “Jill left with them.”
I asked how Ernie and I could contact these demonstrators. She took care of everything and this morning our contact, the young woman we were now following through the twisting byways of Tongduchon, had miraculously appeared.
“Maybe,” Madame Chon told me, “she can help you find Jill.”
She also made me promise that, if I found Jill, I would bring her immediately to the Chon family home. “Any time, day or night,” she said. “When you arrive, you are welcome here.” A kut, a seance presided over by the mudang, a female shaman, would be arranged at once.
I just hoped we wouldn’t need a seance to contact Jill.
The young female student turned down one narrow pathway and then another.
“Student activists,” Ernie said.
I nodded in assent. Radicals, most people would call them. But it didn’t seem too radical a thing to want crimes committed in your own country to be tried in your own courts. Yet in Korea, under the current authoritarian regime, such an opinion was enough to get you thrown in the “monkey house.” Jail.
Occasionally, the girl leading us stopped and peered back along the road. When she was sure we weren’t being followed, she turned again and continued. She stayed carefully away from the Tongduchon City Market and far away from the GI bar district. We were in northern Tongduchon now, in alleyways neither Ernie nor I had ever seen before.
“Is she gonna take us all the way to North Korea?” Ernie asked.
Finally, after two quick turns down alleys running perpendicular to one another, the girl stopped in front of a splintered doorway in a brick wall smeared with soot. Ernie and I halted a few yards away and waited. She rang a buzzer. A man’s voice answered and she whispered into the speaker. The door in front of her opened. She waved for us to follow.
We stepped into a weed-infested courtyard strewn with broken bicycle parts and rusted charcoal stoves and metal detritus of all types. Bricks formed a walkway and we stepped up onto an unvarnished porch and then into a dark, wood-floored hallway with sliding oil-papered doors on either side, two of them open. The entire house reeked of mold and tobacco smoke. In the largest room, young people with shaggy black hair stared up at us warily, most of them puffing on cigarettes.
The majority were boys. It was difficult to determine sex since the boys had smooth faces unblemished by whiskers and the girls were rail thin and wore the same type of blue jeans and baggy shirts that the boys wore. No one greeted us, but a few students slid backwards on the floor until a space opened. I sat. Ernie did the same.
The girl who’d led us here disappeared into a back room.
A young man sitting directly across from us started speaking in English. No preamble. He immediately threw questions at us. It was an interrogation. I did most of the talking. Ernie was busy still sorting the students by gender.
The purpose of the interrogation was transparent. They wanted to know if they could trust us. A reasonable question since Ernie and I were criminal investigators working for the very institution they opposed: the United States 8th Army. I fired a few questions back at the young man. Some of the other students answered too, happy for a chance to practice their English.
They assured me that they didn’t hate Americans. In fact, they admired the American political system and they wanted to emulate it in Korea. But first the Status of Forces Agreement had to be abolished so Korean courts could have full jurisdiction in Korea. So GIs who drove recklessly and murdered innocent people wouldn’t be allowed to return to their home country without punishment. They spoke passionately. Whether or not the two GIs in the truck were guilty of negligent manslaughter was beside the point, they told me. The two GIs should’ve been tried in a Korean court. This was a fundamental demand of their movement: sovereignty of the Korean judicial system. And, incidentally, they wanted all American troops out of South Korea.
As an afterthought.
“Our army is strong,” one of the girls told me. “We can defend ourselves.”
From what I’d seen of the ROK Army, I had to agree. Their soldiers were dedicated and fierce, and a lot less beholden to the fleshly pleasures of life than American GIs. I told them that my main goal was to find Corporal Jill
