The House with a Sunken Courtyard
By Kim Won-il
Translated by Suh Ji-Moon
Dalkey Archive Press

House with a Sunken Courtyard is set in the aftermath of the Korean War. Kim Won-il wrote this reflection in the 1980s as South Korea was preparing for the Olympics and protesters of pro-democracy movements were in the streets. But the nation was not only looking to the future. Each night, viewers across the peninsula were watching televised attempts to help families separated during the war find and reunite with lost relatives. Perhaps this national effort to recall the past inspired Kim to revisit 1954 and 1955, which he describes as the most difficult experience of his life. The narrator begins his story at a pivotal moment: he had been living in the south in Jinyeong in Gyeongsangnam-do province with his father, working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. But when he graduated from grade school, his mother sent for him to live with her in Daegu. The narrator describes his life with his father in positive terms, and he is sad to leave this world behind and move to a new city. His reunion with his mother is harsh. There is little of the milk of human kindness in her. A skilled seamstress, she makes her living as a seamstress creating and maintaining flashy western clothing for the bargirls and prostitutes who ply their trade in the businesses that pop up along the perimeter of the U.S. military bases. The mother explains that as the oldest child, the narrator must say goodbye to his education and assume his proper role as “the pillar of the family.” She is a cold and taxing woman. She feeds him just a few riceballs a day, and her iron-fisted savings regimen keeps the boy and his younger brothers and sisters perpetually underfed and malnourished. She allows him a handful of days to adjust to the new city and then demands that he find employment. After some false starts, he finds he can make a few pennies selling newspapers on the street. The work is hard; the postwar population is still struggling and families can not afford to feed their children, and he spends all day hustling to find enough people to buy 8-12 papers. The story of the boy’s career as he moves up the ranks and into journalism, as well as his suffering at the hands of a mother so abusive he concludes she must have adopted him as a laborer, is only part of a broader account of what it was like for people who had lost everything in the war to rebuild their lives. Kim uses “the house with a sunken courtyard” and its owners and tenants to introduce us to displaced, impoverished, and traumatized individuals and families who are refugees in their own country. The owners of the complex are in the cloth trade and doing well (one of the details Kim notes is that during this period many men were daily wearing what remained of their military clothing; women could make money taking in old military clothing, washing the blood off, stitching up any holes and dying it for sale in street markets). The owners live in the newest part of the property on the highest ground of the ramshackle complex, with the poorest renters of rooms living close to the sunken courtyard. There is no indoor plumbing or heating in the units. Everyone cooks and eats outside their rooms on portable stoves. The courtyard is also home to an outhouse that serves as the only toilet for the 26 or more residents. The young narrator develops a crush on a young woman who somehow manages to look elegant as she leaves each day for high school. There is the mysterious Pyongyang woman who receives visits from a savage-looking man with a scar that runs the length of his face. A veteran stoically heads off to work each morning in a mended uniform; having lost an arm in combat, shiny hooks protrude from one sleeve. The kisaeng girls who pop into her mother’s room at all hours unnerve the young narrator by the utilitarian way they treat their bodies, stripping off skirts and blouses to hand over for mending. Police make inquiries about theft and itinerant wood cutters hire themselves out for a day or days to chop wood for the coming winter. The secret police send in undercover men and raid one of the rooms. They discover a defiant communist. He and his mother had hired a guide to get them to the North; his mother succeeded but the son was caught. As landlords do, they collect and raise rent, eventually turning everyone out to demolish most of the structure and renovate the main house. In an epilogue, the adult narrator meets up with an old friend from that time to talk about the fates of their neighbors. One of the saddest is the story of the Communist. He served 25 years in prison and was released. After a year of freedom, the government ruled that political prisoners must sign a document rejecting their political beliefs. They rearrested the man; predictably, he refused to recant and he is returned to jail. In reading other reviews, I’ve encountered many who observe that the writing is uninventive and there is not much to the plot. I understand this point of view, but House with a Sunken Courtyard is unforgettable and extremely valuable to anyone interested in understanding what happens to people and a nation after all the treaties have been signed. Kim’s work should be read by anyone interested in researching Korea, the Korean War, or the impacts of war on a civilian population–the period Kim’s narrator refers to as “the dirty times.”

“Gilsu, who had warmed up my winter nights like a puppy or a kitten survived the cruel influenza of that winter to live three more years, but died with the “dirty times,” before our family was able to shake off poverty. Because of his uncertain gait and pronunciation, he was refused admission to primary school and died one cold winter night of meningitis, at age eight, without ever having had the benefit of hospital care. At the time, we were renting a room in the boarding quarters of the Deokje Oriental Clinic on Medicine Lane, at about a hundred yard’s distance from the house with the sunken courtyard. Gilsu’s body was put in an empty rice sack made of straw and was carried on an A-frame to a nameless valley behind the lake on the western edge of Daegu to be buried there.”