“You’re right, I don’t care about dying. But I don’t think our resistance is all in vain, as you do. I accept your help with ineffable gratitude—truly. For me, however—and for many others like me . . . The purpose of our movement isn’t simply to avoid extinction. Its purpose is to do what’s right. And you see how we’ve come back to that point where neither of us can convince the other? It is truly outside the realm of logic to determine what is right or wrong. Without any expectations of making you see things the way I do, I can only tell you what my soul insists on.” With that, MyungBo put on his hat again, signaling he was ready to leave.
*
ON THE MORNING OF THE FIRST DAY of March, JungHo woke up with a strange, unintelligible whisper in his ear.
His followers all believed that JungHo had an uncanny ability to sense things before they happened. He had explained that his father had been a tiger hunter in PyongAhn province, and so he’d inherited the same instinct that animals—and their hunters—have for survival. Secretly, he didn’t know if that was true; but living on the streets, he had become attuned to reading people’s faces, hearing their words, and interpreting their silence. Sometimes he really did feel he could simply smell a change in the air and run from danger, whether that was the police or another gang of older boys and grown-ups. In this way, he’d led his group out of trouble several times, and had earned their unshakable trust.
JungHo sat up from the pile of dirty straw mats that made up both the floor and the bed. To his left, Loach was asleep on his side; YoungGu was at the other end, and the dog was snuggling between the two boys at the most comfortable spot in the tent.
“Loach, wake up,” JungHo whispered, shaking his friend’s shoulder.
“Hm? Cut it out, I’m still sleepy.”
“Wake up,” JungHo repeated. “I think something’s going to happen today.”
“What are you talking about?” Loach asked, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. “What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know. Something pretty bad,” JungHo said. It was only as these words left his lips that he realized what he was sensing. “We have to be careful today. I don’t think we should divide up as we normally do. Let’s stick together.”
Noticing JungHo’s seriousness, Loach rounded his eyes and nodded. “Whatever you say, Chief.”
When the pale pink sun rose like an eye over the quiet city, all fifteen boys and one dog left the camp together. Some of the boys wanted to do their usual routines and shows, but JungHo would not let them. Nothing was out of the ordinary beyond the swell of visitors from the countryside, waiting to attend the emperor’s funeral, four days hence. The streets teemed with merchants, vendors, laborers, and students, and their shouts and footsteps made humming sounds on the roads packed brightly with snow. A tantalizing fragrance of roasted chestnuts wafted through the crisp, cold air. All the boys and the dog felt their mouths water and tried to forget their hunger as they wandered through the streets.
When the sun was past its highest point, they stumbled into a wide plaza, which was filled with hundreds of people, many of them students wearing uniforms.
“Hey, JungHo, look at this crowd! I bet we could make a lot of money if we did our act here,” Loach shouted gleefully. But JungHo shook his head; his eyes were gazing far out to the pagoda at the edge of the plaza, where a student was standing, facing the crowd. He was wearing a black newsboy cap and a long winter coat, and looked to be eighteen at most. He raised a fist, and as one the crowd fell silent.
“Today, we declare that Korea is an independent nation and that Koreans are a free people,” the student began, reading from a broadsheet in his hands. His voice should have been lost in the distance; instead, the cold air seemed to magnify it through the plaza, which was filled with an eerie silence.
“We seek to announce this to the whole world in order to illuminate the inviolable truth of human equality, and for our posterity to enjoy the rights of sovereignty and survival in perpetuity. This is in keeping with the conscience of the world, the ordinance of the heavens, and the ethos of our modern era; thus, no power in the world will be able to stop us.
“It has been ten years since we’ve been sacrificed to Imperialism, that dark legacy of the past, suffering immeasurable pain under the oppression of another people for the first time in our five-thousand-year history. All of our twenty million people hold freedom as our most sacred desire. The conscience of all humanity is on our side. Today, our army is Justice, and our spear and shield are Humanitarianism, and with these we shall never fail!” He threw his fist up as though punching the sky, and the crowd roared.