Now trapped, Myung-gi flits back and forth between the present situation and the years leading up to this moment. These memories begin when he was nine-years-old in 1945 when he had the Japanese name, Ichiro and Korea was occupied by Japan. On August 15th, the Japanese surrender, having lost the war in the Pacific. His father, Kim Junho (Ahpa) tells Myung-gi his real name is Kim Myung-gi and that his seven-year-old sister's name is no longer Hideko but Yoomee. They live in Changang Province. Myung-gi is smart, loves to read and gets good grades in school.
But for Myung-gi and his family, freedom lasted only one night, as the Japanese soldiers were replaced by Soviet soldiers soon they learned "that Korea had been divided in half at the 38th parallel...the Soviets occupying the North and the United States occupying the South." While some believe the Soviets are their liberators from Japanese oppression and protecting them from the imperialist Americans, Myung-gi notices Ahpa isn't happy. He tells them the Soviet soldiers are looting homes and decides they will get rid of their valuables. Ahpa also makes Uhma remove her makeup and her jewels and to wear only her plainest clothing so she doesn't attract the attention of the Soviet soldiers.
A year later, life under Soviet rule is even worse than under the Japanese. The soldiers take what they want including most of the harvest, leaving little food for the Koreans. As a result, people are starving and factories close. Ahpa's fabric business has closed because people cannot afford new clothes. He now works as the principal of the boys' school that Myung-gi attends. Ahpa and Myung-gi travel by bus to the city where visit a bookseller. On the bus Myung-gi tells his father he aspires to be a writer. Myung-gi loves "...al kinds of books - history books, fantasy books, even the nonfiction ones that made his eyes grow wide in wonder." At the bookshop, the shop owner tells Ahpa that the authorities told him he cannot sell European American or Japanese books or even Korean books if they are against communism.
By 1948, North Korea is now a Communist state, twelve-year-old Myung-gi meets his friend Sora, bringing her a folktale book and a book of Kim Sowol's poems. As they sit underneath the willow tree, Myung-gi is attacked and beaten by a group of boys accusing him of wanting the Americans to save him.
In September of 1949, Myung-gi witnesses an older boy, Yongshik from his school, kidnapped by soldiers on his way to school. That evening Ahpa brings Myung-gi more books: Twenty thousand Leagues Under The Sea and Ivanhoe. Ahpa has taught Myung-gi several language including English. To hide these banned books, Ahpa cuts a hole in the wall behind Myung-gi's wardrobe.
In June of 1950, Myung-gi is now fourteen years old. He has read through a large number of banned books from Frankenstein to Kim Yeoung-nang's poems. Then one Sunday morning upon arriving at the school for the mandatory weekly communist youth meeting, Myung-gi encounters a huge commotion. Comrade Lee announces that South Korean forces have invaded the North and also that the boys' school has a new principal, Comrade Ahn. This shocks Myung-gi and he races home.
At home, Ahpa tells Uhma, Myung-gi and Yoomee that he was let go and that his work organizing student protests and getting banned books may be to blame. Uhma is terrified at this revelation, worried that Ahpa may be taken away. But Ahpa tells her he has been planning their escape to the south for years, and now with the war as a distraction, it is time to leave. They are to head one hundred miles south, to the mouth of the Yesong River at the Yellow Sea. From there, boats are smuggling people south, to the west coast of South Korea. They will then take a boat to Inchon and walk to Busan on the southern coast.
Ahpa tells them they will leave in a few days after he's confirmed the boat and speaks to the Paks to offer them the chance to accompany them. Ahpa also tells his family that should anything happen to him. they should leave at once and follow the escape route. He tells Myung-gi not to be afraid to go on without him and that they should ask for Ko Jusung when they get to the Yesong River.
For several days, Myung-gi goes to school while his mother packs rice, clothing and money. After school one day, Ahpa tells Myung-gi to keep watch for anything suspicious while he continues to pack the jigeh back carrier. So Myung-gi takes a book about the solar systme with him and sits behind the house on the other side of the wall to read. As a result, he doesn't see the army men creeping along the side of the house and doesn't warn Ahpa. He learns of their presence by the sounds of struggle inside the house. Too late, he sees Ahpa being pushed out of the house, his hands bound behind his back, his eye swoolen and his face bruised. His father is pushed into a car and taken away. Shame floods Myung-gi. He was supposed to keep watch. When Uhuma and Yoomee arrive home, Myung-gi tells them what happened.
Shock quickly leads to indecision as to what to do. Myung-gi tells them that Ahpa has said if anything should happen to him, they need to follow the escape plan and he would meet them in Busan. After careful consideration, Uhma decides they will do what Ahpa asks.
For Myung-gi, the journey south is filled with anger and shame that he failed to protect his father and that he is not the man his father is. In a desperate attempt to redeem himself, he signs up to fight the Communists will be the beginning of self-forgiveness, acceptance and learning to live amid profound loss.
Discussion
In The Tunnel is the second book about the Korean War written by Julie Lee. The novel was born out of Lee's research for her first book, Brother's Keeper which showed that stories like Myung-gi's were a reality: children who were never reunited with family, and child soldiers who were used in a war and never later acknowledged. Lee decided she had to write a story "...in which wrongs inflicted upon the characters were never righted... about this history, because sometimes life is terribly unfair, and I needed to figure out a way to reconcile this reality with being able to move on and be happy..."
The novel features a story within a story, opening with sixteen-year-old Myung-gi Kim fighting the North Koreans in a battle that came to be known as The Battle of Triangle Hill which occurred in the Osong Mountain region from October 14 to November 25, 1952. This was a fierce battle that saw the United States and Republic of Korea Army gain ground, forcing the Chinese to hide in the tunnels they had dug. During the night, the Chinese would regain the territory they lost during the day. Myung-gi, who joined the ROKA with the objective of finding his father, is trapped in one of these tunnels during an attack on the hill. While in the tunnel, Myung-gi remembers back to how this all started in 1945 with the end of World War II and the retreat of the Japanese who had occupied Korea. But instead of freedom, Myung-gi and his family experience increasing oppression and terror as North Korea becomes a communist state. The two stories eventually merge with Myung-gi struggling to survive in the tunnel, while at the same time talking to an enemy Chinese soldier trapped in a separate but adjacent part of the tunnel.
In the flashbacks, the reader learns that Myung-gi's father is kidnapped by North Korean soldiers for his anti-communist resistance. His nose in a book, Myung-gi fails to warn his father of the soldiers and as a result he blames himself for his father being taken. But prior to this, Myung-gi is already filled with self-doubt, believing he doesn't measure up to his father. On a trip to the bookseller to buy books banned by the state, Myung-gi's father questions him about which career he aspires to, principal or professor. Myung-gi reveals he wants to be neither, but instead a writer. Ahpa's response to this makes Myung-gi wonder, "Maybe a writer wasn't big enough, important enough." Later on when Myung-gi is badly beaten by a group of boys, he lies to his parents about what happened because he is ashamed about not being able defend himself. "Ahpa would've never lost a fight, not with his judo and street smarts and muscles."
Once Myung-gi and his family are safely in the south and living in Busan, he continues to struggle with what he believes was his failure to protect his father, with the cultural expectations as the only son and with what his father told him, "Don't be afraid to go on without me." Several times, every day, Myung-gi visits the church where refugees are camped on the lawn, asking if anyone has seen his father. Unable to sleep, and not interested in school Myung-gi begins carrying water to make some money for his family. When Myung-gi is identified as one of several boys who are recommended to take the specialty high school entrance exam in a month's time, he is filled deeply conflicted, "Because the idea of applying to a specialty high school felt a lot like moving on...which felt a lot like giving up on Ahpa... He wasn't ready to start something new without Ahpa."
After Uhma cuts her hair to make money to buy them new shoes, Myung-gi decides to leave school. He is still overwhelmed with guilt for reading when he should have been watching for the North Korean soldiers and cannot bear to pick up a book. He also learns that with the Chinese joining the war, Northern refugees can no longer cross the 38th parallel anymore, meaning that the likelihood Ahpa will escape is now slim. In desperation, Myung-gi decides to enlist, with the hope that being in the North he will be able to find Ahpa and bring him back. "It was his fault Ahpa got taken -- now it was up to him to get his father back. If something happened to Myung-gi in the process, well, that would be the punishment he deserved." This desperate act shocks Uhma, Yoomee, Sora and their families.
Trapped in the tunnel and facing death, Myung-gi faces the prospect of dying alone. With only a small mouse for company, Myung-gi begins to remember some passages from the banned books he's read like Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and The Hobbit by Tolkien. He realizes that as Victor Hugo wrote in his novel, his own father loved him in spite of all his weaknesses and inadequacies. And after three years of futile hoping and wishing, Myung-gi remembers to words of Victor Hugo, "... that it is frightful not to live." As Myung-gi comes to the realization he will not be able to find his father in this war, he want his father to be happy and to live his best life. "But if you're alive, don't be sad, don't stop living, don't spend your days alone. Find a family you can love, and who will love you back -- because we can't be with you anymore. I can't be with you anymore. Be happy!"
As Myung-gi is being rescued his entire perspective has changed: he will live his life as it is now, to the fullest. "And soon he will be set down in the right place -- at home, in Busan, where he will hug Uhma tight and thank her for being both mother and father. Where he will tell his artist sister how proud he is of her and then gaze upon her portrait of their father. Where he will go to Sora, the girl he will always love, and finally say he is sorry...Where he will dig up that book from Teacher Chun and read it from beginning to end. Where he will take that entrance exam and hope for the best. Where he will write their history, his family's, the one he already started. Where he will finally do as his father said and not be afraid to go on without him." Myung-gi, being extracted from the tunnel, experiences a rebirth, coming to accept what he cannot change, that his father is gone and that they likely will not meet again in this life. He realizes that he must go on and live his life and that Ahpa foresaw this possibility and gave him the permission to do so. In the Epilogue, readers learn how well Myung-gi fulfilled his father's desire for him.
The Korean War ended in a stalemate, with an armistice signed on July 27, 1953 in Panmunjom by officials from North and South Korea, The People's Republic of China and the United States. According to the Korean Red Cross, nearly ten million families were separated due to the Korean War. What was originally believed to be a temporary situation has resulted in these millions being denied the basic human right to reunification of their families for the past seventy years. Although there have been some state-sanctioned visits, as the years pass, older members of families are passing on, while younger members suffer from the lack of connection with older family members like grandparents, parents and aunts and uncles. There is not only this trauma, but brief, temporary reunification of families also causes tremendous trauma.
In The Tunnel portrays the trauma of separation experienced by Myung-gi and his family but also the trauma he experienced as a child soldier. Myung-gi was one of at least thirty-thousand child soldiers conscripted into the war by South Korea. Some of these soldiers enlisted, intent upon finding lost family members as Myung-gi did.
In The Tunnel is one of several recent novels to explore the Korean War from the perspective of children. The novel offers readers the themes of forgiveness, the effects of war on civilians including the separation of families, the refugee experience, and living without a resolution to that separation.
Book Details:
In The Tunnel by Julie Lee
New York: Holiday House 2023
332 pp.
New York: Holiday House 2023
332 pp.
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