Couple of years went by like that and the mother died of old age. The tiger stopped dropping by with food after that. A while later the woodsman was coming down the mountain when he ran into three tiger cubs. Each cub was wearing a white hemp ribbon around his tail. The woodsman asked, “Why are you wearing those ribbons, tigers?” Then one of them replied,
“Our grandmother was a human who lived in the village down the mountain. She passed away and our father grieved for months and couldn’t eat or sleep. He died of sadness in our cave and now we’re in mourning.”
The woodsman cried real tears then and felt sorry for tricking the loyal tiger. So he built a monument to the tiger which was just a huge stone with some carvings in our village square. I couldn’t read it but this really did exist next to the ginkgo tree by the well. So that’s why I’m named JungHo—Jung meaning righteous, Ho meaning tiger—I’d say to my underlings. And even the ones who had heard similar stories at their own villages believed me.
I’m not lying about the tiger monument but the truth is that when I was born my father was overjoyed to finally have a son, so he went to the local astrologer and got my name made. My father paid a rabbit for a real name of Chinese characters when plenty of people just named their kids after the first animal or flower that grabbed their eyes, like Loach for instance who claims his mother had mad cravings for loach soup while she was pregnant with him hence his name. My sisters were also just called May and June after their birth months so that’s how much my father loved me specially. The reason I don’t tell this version is that every year I remember less about my father and whenever I talk about him it’s like opening the lid of a boiling stew and letting the steam get out so there’s less of the good stuff in the end. That’s why I don’t talk about him unless I have to and most of the time it’s enough to look at his cigarette case and my mother’s ring to remember that I’m not nobody but Nam JungHo.
EVEN LONG AFTER WE MOVED out from under the bridge, I still used to go back there from time to time. It didn’t make me feel happy—the sight of the muddy water, the stony banks where we used to sleep on nothing but mushy straw mats. But I couldn’t help but feel drawn to it. Do you ever go back to the place where you used to live and feel like you’ve been drinking soju on an empty stomach? Your head turns all of a sudden and you miss things like you don’t even know what. I wouldn’t call that happy but I would sometimes be in the mood for that kind of feeling.
For the longest time of course I didn’t have enough things to eat let alone a drop of liquor and our goal was to keep a steady pace of eating once every two days. We were all starving every second we were awake and even in our dreams. I was often the hungriest of all of us because I’d give my portion to whoever looked like he was at the end of his rope. Sometimes when I handed my piece of dumpling to some kid cold sweat would break on my back because I’d be that hungry. I didn’t do that to buy anyone’s loyalty but ultimately that was how all these guys became closer to me than real brothers. Word got around that Nam JungHo under the bridge was the chief of all Jongno street children and that he feeds everyone who is loyal to him. By the time I was sixteen I had over forty kids under my command.
It was clear then that we couldn’t keep on living under the bridge much longer. It was a godawful place to live even for beggars and in summer the mosquitoes attacked every inch of you and in winter you froze to death almost every night and let me tell you, that gets old after a while. Whenever there was any kind of riot our tents of sacks and straw mats would be torn apart and destroyed. We hid in crannies in the levee that no one else could find and watched as the police burned everything we had down to the last wooden bowl and spoon. This was when Loach convinced me to change ourselves from beggars to “protectors.” Mind you this was not an easy thing to do to just barge into a little Chinese restaurant and demand fees for protecting the business from other gangs. Every neighborhood in every district of Seoul was claimed by one of several gangs both Japanese and Korean and those borders were strictly respected in order to avoid full-out war. I was starting from scratch having claimed no street as my own and with only a ragtag group of beggar boys who knew nothing about fighting. In fact if we weren’t in such a desperate situation I wouldn’t have had the courage to demand money from an elderly man who’d done nothing wrong to any of us. But it was shockingly easy at the end of the day. He took one look at me flanked by Loach and YoungGu and handed me the money with downcast eyes. I counted the money and gauged the going rate of these “protection fees” in the neighborhood and asked for twice that at the café next door. Here the owner was a lady in a floral-patterned blouse and heavy white makeup and she reminded me of a full moon with eyes drawn in charcoal. I’d seen enough women and girls around Seoul to know that she wasn’t beautiful with or without makeup but the simple fact that she was female made my demand even more uncomfortable and embarrassing. But this lady listened to me and handed me the money even giving a slight bow of her head.