Authors: Young-ha Kim
As dusk fell, the sky turned red in an instant like an ill-tempered child. The Yucatán sun lowered its rear to the horizon rather late and then suddenly disappeared. There was not a mountain in sight. The vastness of the plain was felt strongly by the Koreans, who had never in their lives seen the horizon on land. They realized they had been born between the mountains, had grown up looking at the mountains, and went to sleep when the sun fell behind the mountains. This endless plain, with no Arirang Hill of their folk songs, was a truly strange sight, and they tossed and turned not so much because the ground was hard but because of the boundlessness and emptiness around them.
No one had seen anything like the rice paddies and fields of Korea, so their anxiety increased. “Is there no rice in Mexico?” For several days they were provided with boiled corn and tasteless corn tortillas. On the way to Mérida from Progreso, wherever they looked they saw strange plants arranged in evenly spaced rows on the dry earth, like upside-down demons’ toenails, or flames, or even overgrown orchids. From the train they had occasionally seen Indians, dressed in white, cutting the leaves from these plants with scythes. A few of the quicker ones wondered if perhaps this was the work they would be doing. The Mayan Indians lifted their scythes slowly beneath a sun that beat down as if to vaporize everything. At first glance, the work did not appear difficult but more like a carefree pastoral afternoon walk. They cut the branches, tied them, and moved them to carts, and on occasion a man on horseback would say something, but they didn’t seem to be talking about anything serious. Some thought it odd that not a single cow could be seen in the fields. “They’re not going to use us as beasts of burden, are they?” There was all sorts of speculation.
On the fourth day, a two-horse carriage appeared, kicking up dust. The driver holding the reins and two servants escorted the master, who was dressed in white and had a black mustache. When the carriage stopped, the man in white got down and approached the Koreans. But the Koreans thought he was a servant because the uniforms of the driver and servants were far more extravagant and decorative. Several more carriages followed. As before, the drivers in their extravagant clothes sat in the carriages while their masters got down and greeted each other. They looked bright and cheerful. They must have been happy about something, as they repeatedly burst into laughter. Finally the six masters, the hacienda owners, gathered together. The Continental Colonization Company had the Koreans stand up and form themselves into lines. The hacendados walked around and pointed at people with their canes. They singled out those who looked strong and healthy first. Unconsciously, the Koreans straightened their backs. The hacendado who had arrived first took around one hundred people, while the others took slightly fewer. Apparently the one who hired the most had the right to choose first. The hacendados signed documents and handed them to John Meyers. That day, about half of the people traveled to haciendas from the three train stations situated around Mérida.
More hacendados continued to arrive into the next day. They did not comment on the workers, but simply chose the first ones they saw and took them to their haciendas. The Koreans from the
Ilford
were scattered among twenty-two haciendas in the Yucatán. It took a week for all 1,032 to be chosen. The last hacendado to arrive, a mestizo, appeared alone on a horse pulling a cart with no driver and no servants. He ran a hacienda near the Guatemala border. The representative of the Mérida association of hacendados pulled aside the tent flap, flashed him a smile, and went out to greet him. He brought with him a Korean man who had been squatting in the shade of a carriage to avoid the sun. “All the others have been taken, and only this one is left.” The representative smiled broadly, showing his teeth. The young mestizo had no choice, so he signed the document and looked at the last Korean. It looks like it’s time to hear a new song. The singing never ceased at his hacienda. He heard African songs from the blacks he had bought from Belize. He had Mayans, once the rulers of the Yucatán, singing Mayan songs. He had coolies singing the boat songs of Guangzhou. The mulattos from across the channel in Cuba were skilled in dancing and drumming. Now he would be able to hear strange new songs from this man who came from a place called Korea. The man’s neck was long and he looked like he had a good voice. The hacendado was fortunate. The Korean was, in fact, the owner of a unique voice. He hesitated when the interpreter urged him to sing a song, and then he began to sing in a trembling voice: “Like the heart of a hen pheasant chased by a falcon on a hill with no trees, no boulders, no stones; like a sailor in the midst of the vast ocean on a boat carrying a thousand sacks of rice, having lost its oars, lost its anchor, broken its masts, snapped its rigging, and dropped its rudder, and the wind blows and the waves crash and the fog is thick, yet there are still a thousand miles, ten thousand miles to go, and the sky is dark and he is alone in heaven and earth and the sea shines red with the setting sun, and then he meets a pirate . . .” It was a song meant to be sung by a woman with a male voice. The melody was endlessly slow and mysterious, and the young hacendado was amazed. The man’s voice was like a boy’s before puberty, but also like the voice of a woman lost in sadness. The representative of the association of hacendados approached and raised his hand to stop the singing. Then he smiled broadly and squeezed the crotch of the last remaining Korean with his right hand. With a face that said “No wonder,” he whispered something to the young mestizo. The Korean grimaced with shame, and the hacendado put him in his cart. With a discount of 50 pesos, as compensation for the testicles he had no use for, there was no reason not to take him.
His name was Kim Okseon. It was not until he was seven years old that he realized he was missing something. His family told the boy that a dog had bitten off his testicles when he was relieving himself. He was young, but he didn’t believe them. It was not long before he learned that his father had tied off his testicles with a leather strap, so tight that the blood did not flow, and then cut them off. And before he was ten years old, he entered the palace and began to wait on the eunuchs. “It’s a way to make a living, isn’t it?” his father said. “What would you do with those balls anyway?” His father clapped him viciously on the back of the head as the boy left, crying. That was the last he saw of his family. Kim Okseon became a musician. He learned to play stringed instruments and the flute and he memorized songs. When the royal family held an event, he sang and sometimes danced. He once received a fan from Gojong himself during the festivities to celebrate the rebuilding of Gyeongbok Palace. When the empress was stabbed to death, Gojong fled to the Russian legation, and the Coup of 1884 and the Reform of 1894 shook the world both inside and outside the palace. The fate of the eunuchs also flickered like a candle in the wind. They took sides, dividing themselves into enlightenment and conservative factions. The days when they weren’t paid grew more frequent, so the musician eunuchs stopped going to the palace. Some of them taught music and dance to gisaeng. Others returned to their hometowns to farm, but their families did not welcome the eunuchs, and they found it difficult to bear the gossip. Kim Okseon and two other eunuchs wanted to leave for a place where no one knew them. One of them read the
Capital Gazette
and contacted the others, and a few days later they packed up all they owned and headed for Jemulpo. During their long voyage they spoke less and less to the other passengers, mostly keeping to themselves. Almost no one realized that they had once been palace musicians.
I
N THE TENT VILLAGE
on the outskirts of Mérida, Ijeong was interested in one thing alone. Who would be going to the hacienda with him? When it became clear that they were not all going to the same hacienda, Ijeong hoped that he could go to the same one as Yi Yeonsu and her family. If he could have one more wish, it would be to go with the former soldiers he had come to know on the ship. But everything was decided by the hacendados’ canes. One by one, those he knew were chosen. Still a boy, Ijeong was called out much later than Jo Jangyun and his comrades. As he left, Jo Jangyun clapped Ijeong on the shoulder. “Don’t be afraid. We’ll see each other again soon.”
It was sad for Ijeong to part with the person he had relied on like a father. “Farewell,” Ijeong said, bobbing his head in a bow. He also said goodbye to Bak Jeonghun, who stood silently at Jo Jangyun’s side. Bak Jeonghun squeezed Ijeong’s hand. “We’ll see each other again. The world is not nearly as large as you might think.”
Yi Jongdo and his family were in a similar situation, and it was hard to find a hacendado who would choose a middle-aged man with a wife, a young boy, and a girl. What if they break up the families? Yi Jongdo was extremely nervous. He had long since given up any thought of boldly approaching a Mexican aristocrat and demanding a position appropriate to someone of his status. He was not a fool. On the way to Mérida, packed like luggage on the train, he realized just how impetuous his decision to leave had been, and he regretted it. Neither rank nor learning mattered in this place. The only thing left was his family. While he, thoroughly discouraged, read
The
Analects of Confucius,
the only book he had brought with him, his wife and daughter surprisingly drew water, cooked their meals, and made an effort to get to know the women around them. Had they not, they wouldn’t have been able to survive even a day. Yet the more they adapted, the more he was discouraged by his own powerlessness, which forced his family to mingle with those of lowly standing.
A hacendado who arrived late that day, at around sunset, must have had something in mind, for he began to choose mainly those immigrants who had families. Yi Yeonsu obediently followed her father and stood in a line in front of the hacendado who had chosen them. Among those who had not yet been chosen, she spied Ijeong’s handsome forehead and eyes. Their eyes met. Yeonsu felt the strength leave her body, and she had to grab her mother’s hand as she walked on ahead. Then another carriage arrived, and this hacendado, short and pudgy, chose mostly single men. He poked Ijeong in the stomach with his cane. Yeonsu buried her face in her baggage. Tears gushed out. Once she started crying, she could not stop. Her father cleared his throat and her mother jabbed her in her side and scolded her. “Quiet!” Mucus ran from her nose, past her dirty lips, and into her mouth.
John Meyers look satisfied with himself. Taking into account the passengers’ fare on the
Ilford
and the food and cigarettes they had consumed, even after splitting the profits with the Continental Colonization Company he would still be left with a large sum for which he would have had to work three years back home. The owners of the Yucatán’s henequen haciendas, which suffered from a severe labor shortage, paid a relatively dear price for the Korean immigrants, who could not speak Spanish and thus were no risk of flight, and who did not have a diplomat stationed here who would interfere in the landowners’ affairs. Henequen, the raw material for shipping rope, had become a precious commodity as shipping tonnage increased with imperial competition for colonies and the rapid development of Western capitalism. Rope made from the fiber of the henequen plant was durable and sturdy. The world rope market was divided between henequen fiber and the Manila hemp of the Philippines. “Put ghosts to work for all we care,” said the hacendados of the Yucatán. They had much to do.
Henequen is native to Mexico and grows to about the height of a person. Leaves grow out from the short trunk, which is as sturdy as a tree. The thick, fleshy leaves measure between three and six feet in length, with sharp, white tips, and are four to six inches wide in the center. The leaves grow thick on the short trunk. After ten or fifteen years, a stalk about nine feet high emerges and flowers bloom. After the flowers fade, the stalk dries up and dies. A plant produces about thirty leaves a year, and anywhere from two to three hundred leaves in its lifetime. The edges of the leaves are studded with countless hard, pointy spikes, like a cactus. The Koreans said the leaves resembled dragon tongues, and so called the plant “dragon tongue orchid.” It is not an orchid but a single-seed leaf plant that belongs to the class Liliopsida. It is similar in appearance to aloe, so many people confuse the two, but their uses are entirely different. A liquor called pulque is fermented from henequen. It is a very useful plant—for its fiber, for making alcohol, and for making dye. It is hardy in dry climates, so it is well suited to the Yucatán. Henequen and sisal hemp became the primary products of the Yucatán in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
The Yucatán Peninsula is roughly the size of South Dakota. To the east, it is separated from Cuba by the Yucatán Channel, which joins the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, and the Gulf Stream flows rapidly northwest. Joining Mexico on the Yucatán Peninsula are Guatemala to the south and Belize to the southeast, and with the exception of Belize, which was under the influence of the British navy and pirates, nearly the entire area had originally been ruled as a colony of Spain. But when the 1,032 Koreans arrived, most of the population of the Yucatán was Mayan. Hundreds of years had passed since the Mayan Empire had fallen, but the native people still used the Mayan language and lived according to the Mayan calendar. The descendants of the empire that had left behind great pyramids, the Mayans fought with the federal government of Mexico and the landowners of the haciendas. Their war for independence reached its zenith in 1847. Tens of thousands of Mayans fled to British-controlled Belize to avoid oppression, and those who were captured before reaching the border were sold as slaves to Cuba and the Dominican Republic. As many as thirty-three additional uprisings broke out between 1858 and 1864, and at one point the main Mayan force captured the central Yucatán city of Mérida. The Yucatán Mayans, who bought weapons from the English pirates in Belize, attacked white-controlled areas using guerrilla tactics, on occasion winning major victories. Yet they were unorganized, and they each returned to their own cornfields whenever it rained, so they failed to secure a decisive victory. Such were the limitations of the peasantry. In the end, mercenaries from Cuba and one hundred military advisers sent from the United States landed, and a massacre began. Federal forces, supported by the United States, completely suppressed the Mayans in 1901. At the end of the long and arduous war, the Mayan population had been drastically reduced, but the demand for henequen fibers exploded. The hacendados had no choice but to import laborers from abroad. Four years later, the Koreans arrived.