“Let’s start from the top,” MyungBo nudged gently. “You remember this syllable . . .”
JungHo searched in the innermost depths of his being for the answer. His eyes felt watery from the effort, but he came up to the surface with the correct name: “It’s dae.”
“Very well done! Excellent! And then the next one?” MyungBo said, brimming with excitement. JungHo forged on in order to not disappoint his mentor, diving into his mind and bringing back answers one by one.
After an excruciating hour, MyungBo closed the book. “That’s enough reading for today I think,” he said, then smiled, as if to reassure JungHo. “I know it’s very difficult, Comrade JungHo. But my instinct tells me you’ll play a large part in our independence, and that’s what I’m preparing you for. Now let’s try writing.”
For the past several months, MyungBo had been asking JungHo to copy all the dozens of consonants and vowels from their workbook. Instead, MyungBo now wrote out just three syllables on the sheet of paper and asked JungHo to read them out loud.
“Nam . . . Joong . . . Jung . . .” JungHo looked up at his mentor, who was beaming. “It’s my name.”
“I haven’t been teaching you the right way—that was hampering your progress. Let’s first learn the most important word. Everything you write henceforth under your name has to be done in honesty and good faith. That’s what it means to have a good name—not who your family is or how rich or famous you are.”
JungHo copied from MyungBo’s example, writing the first syllable again and again, then the second, then the third, until he filled the page. Then he turned that sheet facedown, took a blank sheet of paper, and shakily wrote out the three syllables of his name together for the first time. When he finished, he looked up eagerly like a schoolboy and saw that MyungBo had tears in his eyes.
“Well done, my friend,” MyungBo said, trying to conceal the breaking of his voice. “You have a lot of strength in your penmanship—it’s like your personality.”
The childish letters were overlarge and uneven, but JungHo knew it was a genuine compliment and not a mockery.
That night, JungHo inwardly promised himself to live his life as to make MyungBo proud; before, he’d only wanted a way to improve himself in order to win Jade. MyungBo was connected to him through neither blood nor love—it was honor that bound them irrevocably together. Upon this realization he added MyungBo to his list of people to keep safe, no matter what.
Despite being one of the forty richest men in Korea and unfathomably influential, his mentor was living in constant mortal danger. His life was at an even greater risk since he renounced pacifism and compromise. MyungBo told JungHo that peacefully marching for independence had sacrificed too many lives for little gain, and that in order to gain their freedom they had to fight back. （JungHo had no problem understanding this portion of their lessons. He rather felt like saying, “Of course, what did you expect, you rich people?” but bit his tongue out of deference.） Unfortunately, the wings of the Korean armed forces had largely been clipped. The independence army based in Vladivostok had won victory after victory for a decade, sometimes joining forces with the Red Army against Japan. But afterward, the Bolsheviks demanded the Koreans disarm and disband, or be absorbed under the Russian command. Those who refused were killed or imprisoned.
The independence army in Manchuria had fared only a little better, severely weakened after the Japanese army massacred tens of thousands of Koreans living there, civilian or otherwise. That left Shanghai as the only viable center of armed resistance, although raising an army there in the heart of China was impossible. MyungBo therefore believed that the only effective course was to attack singly those places Japan valued the most: their police stations, banks, government offices, armories, and the like, in Korea, Japan, and China. MyungBo was trying to establish a group of exceptional snipers in Shanghai for these high-profile targets.
“We’re at war, Comrade JungHo. And sometimes, despite your best intentions and efforts, war is inevitable,” MyungBo had once said, almost like an apology. JungHo hadn’t needed that explanation, but he nodded and grimaced to show he didn’t take any of this lightly. He believed that his mentor would never lead him astray or ask him to do something shameful or unjust. He would live up to MyungBo’s expectations, when the time came. Until then, he was called to a hundred different tasks MyungBo couldn’t do himself: deliver forbidden manifestos to the socialists in the South, hide fugitives in safe houses and deliver them food, discreetly exchange a suitcase with a stranger at the train station under the plain gaze of the gendarmes. JungHo gave his all to these assignments, and MyungBo rewarded him—not with money or promotions, but with his unspeakable goodness.