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Just like any naive reader who got too greedy, Lee Sookyung, when she was young, briefly dreamed of being a writer.
Reflecting on this childhood desire in her first month of prison, she realized she never had genuine ambitions to make her mark on the literary world—she always preferred reading, the easy path. Wanting to be a writer probably came from the somewhat pathetic desire of a young girl who grew up in a traditional household: she was desperate to be sincere, to be heard.
Something in the universe must have condemned her for concealing these desires for so long. The only person who ever would listen to her stories was her son, and the only time she told him stories was to distract him from fear.
“Excuse me.” Prisoner 406 spoke from behind. “The line’s moved ahead.”
“Ah, sorry.”
Lee Sookyung closed the gap she had left open, holding out her tray. Today’s meal was kongbap and a watery vegetable soup.
“Having a visitor today?”
She turned around once again. 406—Lee Boksoon, the oldest woman from her cell—gazed up at her with a kind face.
Lee Sookyung quietly blurted out the truth. “My son.”
A head tilting. “You’re stiff as a board. Aren’t you happy to see him?”
“I…”
The tray line went ahead. Many of the rest of the prisoners in the cafeteria were nearly finished. Most ate with their heads down. Before Lee Sookyung could exit the line, Lee Boksoon patted her shoulder, maternal. “Don’t be nervous. We all felt this way.”
Even with this stranger’s attempts to ease her, she barely touched her meal. Her visiting slot came right after lunch. Guards led her in handcuffs down a long corridor, washed in muted gray from the sky outside. Then, even at first glance, she could tell there was no natural lighting within the visiting center.
Lee Sookyung saw the panels of glass before she spotted Dokja. Those were the only windows she had to the real world. Thus, the door shut heavily behind her.
.
“How was the visit?” Lee Boksoon asked her that night, surprising Lee Sookyung.
“It went fine.”
She smiled politely and reassuringly.
When she had asked if he was eating well, he had told her yes, there were just some foods he didn’t like. At such a young age, he had already learned that good liars always slipped in an element of truth. Your father is only a little drunk today. He hit me, but it wasn’t on purpose this time. Of course I’ll still be with you when you wake up, Dokja-ya; I can handle the situation.
In fact, his father remained unspoken, a gaping wound in Dokja’s visit. But he still knew the truth, no matter how much she rewrote that man’s death. Lee Sookyung saw it in his eyes.
“What does your son look like?”
“He’s… just like any other boy. He’s a little small for his age. He’s ten…” Lee Sookyung briefly lost her eloquence.
Cameras also overlooked the cells. Lee Sookyung wished she could rid herself of the itchy feeling of scrutinization. She was being watched, just like when she was a little girl, just like when she lived with an angry man. Just like her visit with Dokja.
“He seems safe,” she gathered herself. “As his mother, that’s all I can ask for.”
She wasn’t there by her side. However, that outcome could have been worse. This distance was a burden she could shoulder.
Lee Boksoon nodded when the silence lingered. “Me as well, you know.”
“As well?”
“This old-bag convict you’re talking to is a caring grandmother. Besides those little brats, guess how many siblings I’ve raised.” Lee Boksoon chuckled. “Come here. Let me tell you about my youngest one. He’s the smallest in his family, just like yours.”
Lee Sookyung said nothing as she listened. Did something on her face show that easily for Lee Boksoon to notice how she felt? She kept herself hard to read, so the idea unsettled her.
Lee Boksoon’s stories were kindly told, but when all the prisoners went to sleep, Lee Sookyung was alone. The memory of blood kept her eyes open, and the truth remained burning within her chest: Dokja is not safe yet.
.
That man who would become her husband initially reminded her of the main character from a novel she liked, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. He was a bottom-of-the-ladder office worker, and she was an aimless literature student. At the time, she thought they were quite similar—they were both people who felt like they were going nowhere in society, Underground dwellers.
She was wrong. That man never thought of her as an equal, and perhaps she should have used that book as a warning for his anger as much as a reminder of her exclusion. There was no room for her to be the main character in Dostoyevsky’s book.
The apartment they lived in together was like Lee Sookyung’s cave, with no one to pull her out. Her mother only spoke coldly over the phone about her choices. Her sister reminded her of the social suicide she would commit leaving like this, and surely mother will be providing no support afterward. She didn’t even have a job, after all.
In the quiet morning, head down, she prepared Dokja for school. At night, she settled him in bed and read him stories, and they both clung to them as the Persian king clung to Scheherazade’s tales in One Thousand and One Nights. Perhaps many of Dokja’s bad habits began here.
In prison, Lee Sookyung remained in a cave.
There was never privacy, but besides her newfound fear of being discovered, the environment wasn’t much different from home. It was more comfortable in some ways. Her cellmates shared blankets, accommodating even the harsh or anti-social women. They stuck together when the guards decided to punish one of them and embargoed everyone’s rations. At lights off, they also told each other stories—from their life, not fictional. Lee Sookyung learned about picking through trash to survive, how hands felt around a neck, the many ways self-defense went twisted and fatal.
But she didn’t tell any of her own stories.
She remained civil with them all nonetheless, and she read the very few books available to her, shelved in a far-off room. Finally, when she was granted printer paper and a cheap pen, she wrote in there during her recess. Dokja visited her every other week. In prison, time moved in a loop, so Lee Sookyung repeated the same days and nights again and again, the clot of blood sharp in her memory, the stench of alcohol and iron stained in her fingers, all seeping into faded blue print on her pages.
I was afraid
Lee Sookyung’s hand shook. The pen pressed in the paper and left a deep imprint of ink.
In the end, she could not put it on the paper.
.
Excerpt from Underground Killer
Part I, Chapter I
“Tell me, dear readers, do you believe in determinism? It means all our actions were set in place from the beginning. It was predetermined for my husband to beat me and for my household to suffer.
Determinism means we are all prisoners—not solely to society, but to fate itself.
Why should I regret murdering my husband? It was the only way to survive.
Now I am kept behind bars, where my decisions are made for me. I eat on an exact schedule, and I sleep when the lights darken. I pick up my pen solely in my given hours. You, self-constrained, live the same way as me. Unlike me, you are able to leave your life’s structure. I am not burdened by that choice, as you are. I’m writing as a prisoner, but am I not the freest out of all of you?”
.
Cho Youngran arrived in their cell with a haggard expression. The first thing she ever said to Lee Sookyoung was, “I read that book.”
She looked like all the women with their heads down in the facility. She was just tired. But Lee Sookyung saw a bit of anger in her, and she found it interesting. The second thing Lee Sookyung felt was resignation.
When Lee Sookyung said nothing, Cho Youngran set her jaw. “The Underground Killer was an awful person, you know that?”
“Yes.”
Otherwise, Cho Youngran settled in without complaints. She said nothing else to Lee Sookyung.
One night, she shot up with sharp gasps.
Lee Sookyung watched her silhouette heave.
“Are you alright?” She asked.
Cho Youngran laughed bitterly. “I killed my husband. No matter how much the news portrays such events these days, I’m not rational and cold-blooded. A man is dead because of me.”
“Me, too,” Lee Sookyung said.
“I know.”
“I mean that I have dreams, too. Many of the others as well. You might have to get used to hearing people wake up crying.”
“…I see.”
Cho Youngran turned towards Lee Sookyung, and the moonlight crept across her expression. She had the familiar look of hiding painful emotions with her best blank face. Cho Youngran’s mask was unique in that it was steely, like a mercenary.
It compelled Lee Sookyung to say, “You can share some things from your life, if you want. Everyone here has. It will be good for you.”
Cho Youngran paused, then nodded.
Neither spoke again, but Cho Youngran seemed to understand that Lee Sookyung would watch over her. She closed her eyes and turned a few times from side to side. Even when the rise and fall of her chest slowed, Lee Sookyung stayed awake and watching.
.
“Lee Sookyung?”
“Yes?”
“You’re food has gotten cold. I get it—I’m sure everyone here is a bit tired of kongbap. But we have to eat to survive in this place.”
“Ah… No, it’s not that. I was distracted, that’s all.”
She was telling the truth. She thought too frequently of her past during her stay here. Especially after she had finished her novel, she couldn’t use her writing progress to track time anymore. But it moved onwards without her awareness.
It had been three years since she wrote that novel.
Dokja’s latest visit had more heavy silence rather than barraging questions. Now, she sat staring at her hands rather than the food. This was how she sat through her son’s anger and defeat for so long. She sometimes couldn’t even meet his eyes.
.
The other prisoners were aware that Lee Sookyung’s visitor schedule had dwindled.
“Murder is still a grave crime,” Lee Boksoon finally addressed it when they were doing their morning exercises. “They didn’t have to blow up your book so much. But even if the news coverage intensity has faded, it is still a lot of pressure to tend to a criminal, especially when you start growing up. I had to accept it when my siblings slowly stopped coming here.”
“I see,” Lee Sookyung said.
“We grew apart, that’s all. They got older and wiser, and some became more ashamed. Well, many of the others never have visitors.”
“That sounds lonely,” Lee Sookyung acknowledged. She thought of Ways to Survive in a Ruined World. She thought of her silence. “You’ve lived through a lot, Boksoon-ssi.”
“How has he grown to be like? Your son.”
“He doesn’t talk about himself very much.”
“Hmm. Then he’s like you.”
.
“Dokja, do you know this one?”
Lee Sookyung was telling her son Scheherazade’s story. The king beheaded each of his new brides after they spent one night together, so when Scheherazade wed him, she told him a bit of a story until each dawn, stopping right in the middle. Wanting to know the ending, the king would spare her for another night, so she would survive, for one thousand stories, one thousand and one long nights.
Dokja had always loved these fantasy-type tales, which was why he also adored Greek myths, where heroes and gods alike followed the path of set fate in circles. Where tragedy came from attempting to escape that fate.
Greek figures were a centerpiece of Ways of Survival. Of course they were. But Lee Sookyung had told her sons these stories first.
One short story from her college thesis paper was “The Dog Thief” by Lim Chulwoo, which he wrote during university, inspired by the Kwangju Uprising. Reading it as a student herself, she admired how he wrote his characters: they were normal civilians rather than soldiers, and they did not play a hand in the bloodshed, yet deep guilt pierced their lives from witnessing it.
In that household, she wasn’t even facing a massacre, nor some bloody war. Did she deserve to tell stories? Of course she knew what abuse was like. Of course she knew she was experiencing pain that she could just escape. She was foolish because she could have just left, and yet—
“Lee Sookyung.”
Lee Sookyung snapped awake.
“You were shaking in your sleep.”
In prison, time moved in a loop, so Lee Sookyung repeated the same days and nights again and again.
She let out a shaky breath. Cho Youngran’s soldier-taut shoulders softened.
No matter how strong she tried to be, Lee Sookyung only dreamed about these things. She reread the worst parts of her life, everything unchanged.
“Did you have a nightmare?”
“I can’t remember,” Lee Sookyung lied. “Did I make any noise? I must have disturbed you.”
“You were muttering about a book. Was it the one you published?”
Lee Sookyung fell silent for a moment.
“It wasn’t.”
“You can share some things from your life, if you want. Everyone here has. It will be good for you.” Cho Youngran smiled wryly.
Lee Sookyung also smiled, but it faded quickly, so she looked down. “It really wasn’t about Underground Killer, but it might as well have been. The older I can, the more I wonder if I handled the Underground Killer’s remorse properly.”
“I always wanted to ask about that part. It seemed to her that being a “victim” and “killer” were separate concepts—Once she became a killer, she immediately was cured of her victimhood.”
“You read it very well.”
“When I stayed homebound to support my husband who had lost his job at the police force, I obsessed over anything I owned—any show or book I had the chance to find privately. Like they were my life force. Like I needed to go all out to understand them.”
Lee Sookyung nodded, smiling balefully. “Like I couldn’t enjoy things normally…”
“What was he like, your son?”
“I thought you read my book.”
“Well, the Underground Killer never really talked about her child much. He seemed more like a symbol. For example, I can describe all I want about how creative and rambunctious my daughter is, but no one will understand how I felt when I saw her scribble horses all over the walls. She’s living properly now.”
“Ah, Dokja did that, too. Fantasy beasts with big wings.”
“See what I mean?”
Lee Sooyung couldn’t help but smile. Cho Youngran really missed her daughter. “Your point is taken.”
“What about the Underground Killer?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did she even think she could live life properly after everything ended? She talked like she would never leave the prison, but she didn’t even have a lifetime sentence.”
“…I don’t know,” Lee Sookyung said. “It’s as you said. I don’t know. Because I’m irredeemable.”
Cho Youngran’s hand moved. She paused, then put it back down into her lap.
“What does that mean for us, then?” Cho Youngran said. “Where does that put someone like me?”
Lee Sookyung had thought about this question before. She glanced at the sleeping figures beside her. By writing her novel, she had also condemned the other women in her cell.
.
Because of the snow, they did not have duties or scheduled time outside of the prison.
Lee Boksoon was the first to tease Lee Sookyung once she fell silent. “You’re so deep in thought that you might become lost, Sookyung. Will we need to find you and pull you out?”
Lee Sookyung turned to the others.
“My son… today is his twentieth birthday.”
Her cellmates stilled, then smiled slightly.
“Ah, so Sookyung-ssi’s son’s birthday was today.”
“After so long, we finally learn a bit more…”
“Is this an occasion to celebrate?”
“No,” Lee Sookyung said. “He’s grown a lot… Do you ever feel you don’t understand your children at all anymore?”
“Is that why you look so burdened?” Lee Sookyung started to shake her head. Lee Boksoon continued. “You were imprisoned when he was very young, so you never got to see the rebellious phase. When my sister became a teenager, she kept trying to distance herself—your classic young adult.”
“No, I…” But Lee Sookyung couldn’t deny the last parts. Dokja definitely resented her to the point of self-distance. She laughed a bit. Shook her head. “Well, yes, he is a young adult. And to think, I can still remember clearly…”
Eyes turned to her, though they weren’t hungry—they were sincere and curious, like the eyes a child had when he was waiting for a story he cared for.
“There was this one time he got groceries with me… It was early February, near his birthday as well…” Suddenly, Lee Sookyung choked up. The boy on the other side of the glass was once the boy who had clutched her hand in the light flurry, the sleeve of his secondhand parka too big, the plastic bag in his other hand dragging along the sidewalk. Passerby beamed at the two of them, asking his name, making little jokes or small talk, and both their bruises went unnoticed, and her conversations were mundane. For once, she could smile and speak and was treated as a normal person. The flakes of snow in her hair.
Lee Sookyung pressed her face in her hands.
Dokja, when strangers ask you for your name, you will always have to explain it. I wrote the hanja myself. Your mother’s hands were one of the first to write your story, to give you this burdensome name. Dokja, your mother was a Reader first. I selfishly named you after me.
Will I be able to sit with you and tell you stories again? Can I read from the beginning, my pen over the blank certificate?
All of her cellmates were silent, but she heard the whisper of fabric, the shuffle of them all coming to her side. The hands on her back were warm; still, she could not be consoled.
Her son, she thought at least they had both loved stories. They both had that in common. But this story that she couldn’t love… Lee Sookyung did not have something like that. She never loved a story so much. Not the foreign folktales she comforted herself with as a child, not Lim Chulwoo’s war fiction, not Notes from Underground, never anything. She never had…
.
Lee Sookyung stepped into the visiting center, where her son waited for her on the other side of the glass. The season for snow had long passed. It was their first time meeting this year.
“I’m going to military service, next winter,” Dokja said. “I, ah, wanted to let you know. Because of that, I might not visit you for a while.”
She nodded slightly, but it was pointless; his eyes were lowered.
“I’m… eating well.”
Old habits. Lee Sookyung had always worried about whether he was getting his meals, even before all that had happened. Kim Dokja always lied the same way he had when he was ten years old.
“Mother.” Dokja lifted his head. “At least, won’t you…”
He paused, looking at Lee Sookyung’s expression. Something in it shut his mouth.
With each tick of time, his gaze lowered further again.
There were so many cameras around them, and guards. Always so many eyes.
“Today’s chapter, Yoo Joonghyuk visited where the Breaking the Sky Sword Saint lived...”
Lee Sookyung’s heart hardened.
“He wandered the streets she protected this round. While he did, he bought some of his favorite Murim dumplings, and he stood at the steps of her home, and he wished he had saved her after all that time… He did everything except for going in and meeting her… For Yoo Joonghyuk, it was too painful for him… It was enough for him to just stand and look…”
Ten minutes of visiting time. Dokja had stopped asking her questions long ago. He wasn’t a trembling child with bandages on his cheeks anymore. He had grown up without her.
Dokja. I became friends with some of my cellmates. I’m no longer alone. One of them read my book before coming here… Sometimes, I think about everyone I harmed with my writing. After all, stories have so much power.
I don’t want to hear about this web novel, either. I just want to hear about your life. I want to hear if you’re eating well. That is the only story I need.
But because she said nothing, she only learned about his life through the one story he retold her. Perhaps he didn’t do anything but read those updates, anyways. It was her fault. Long ago, when his question bore repeatedly upon Lee Sookyung, she stayed silent, just like she used to remain before her angry mother and siblings and husband—this time, that burning silence had been out of her own volition.
She wrote Underground Killer because it was necessary for his survival.
She wanted to yell at him to return to reality, but then she would have been a hypocrite.
Her son continued to look down and mutter.
Though still thin, he was taller. His face lost all shreds of baby fat. He had lived through things she no longer knew about, and he read stories she hadn’t learned before.
Lee Sookyung loved Dokja more than any other story.
This story was not one she had taught him.
She knew before he did.
Lee Sookyung knew, maybe since the very beginning, that though he was her son, she had no right to call herself his mother.
The end.
.
“Why did you write that book?”
Lee Sookyung’s chest tightened.
Cho Youngran looked at her without accusation, only her usual straightforward curiosity.
The question had worsened Lee Sookyung’s quality of sleep. It felt more and more with time that her answer was merely a justification, like all the other answers she silently had for Dokja. Staying in that apartment. Taking the knife. Writing that novel.
But if she regretted her resolutions, it was too late. Perhaps ever since she married that man—perhaps ever since she had been born—“Lee Sookyung” slowly stopped existing. All that remained was the narrative of a mother who murdered her husband.
In silence, she had watched her son reach the age she had been when she was imprisoned, then older. She didn’t stop him when he walked away. To be honest, she felt relieved. Now that he was obsessed with a different story, she truly had no right to say anything else to him. For some reason, that hurt her. This guilt was just another of her retributions.
Lee Sookyung made herself meet Cho Youngran’s eyes. The spring day was peaceful in the prison yard. The prisoners talked and watched the sky. The guards stood and watched the prisoners.
Cho Youngran’s eyes were sharp. Dokja’s had been dull. Why did you write it?
In these calm days, her release date was soon approaching.
Was that why Cho Youngran brought it up? Even though the court gave them the same sentence, even if Lee Sookyung really had let everyone get so close, did Cho Youngran think that she would talk about her greatest sin so easily?
Well, Lee Sookyung had also shared things she never thought she would. She thought of the hands pressing her back that day her emotions tumbled out. Cho Youngran’s hand had been there, too, so it was natural for the other to feel that she understood Lee Sookyung.
“Do you know the first thing I heard about you?”
“What is it?”
“Everyone told me that your favorite part of this prison was the library. You spent your free time reading and talked about each book thoughtfully, like you truly enjoyed them all.”
“I didn’t realize I was being observed so carefully.”
“Whether you like it or not, we’ve all learned things about each other in this small, shitty space. You’re not so cold a person. The time that old warden bullied us, the time we went on strike, all the times you wouldn’t let that levelheaded wall slip, don’t you know we had our eyes on you? You kept us together, you and your words. All the things you learned from those books.
“So I thought you had faith in stories, but when I read your novel, your viewpoint felt completely different. Maybe I’m not high-brow enough to say anything about fiction—didn’t do university, didn’t do anything I wanted to do after I married—but even when stories are about dark things, don’t they always have an aspect of lightness, or some comfort?”
That was true. Even if the ending was still bad, even if it was brief, a main character always had a chance. In Notes from Underground, the bitter Underground Man found hope for love and true human connection. It was he himself who pushed it away instead of reaching for it, condemning himself back into the “underground.”
If one read a story for too long, one would eventually resemble that story. Lee Sookyung knew this.
If one wrote a story, and was remembered by solely that story, did it matter that she was anything else?
Lee Sookyung had been confined within roles all her life.
She had failed as a mother, the role she was meant to play—briefly, the role she resolved quietly to be more than anything.
Cho Youngran continued, “That book… I’ve said this before, but when I read it, I hated it for a lot of reasons.”
Lee Sookyung smiled. “I undersand.”
“What I hated the most was how you wrote that last part… the Underground Killer moved effortlessly, without thinking…When I pointed my husband’s gun at him, my hands shook. Even though he hurt me the most—me and my daughter—I hesitated.”
“…”
“Because I was scared.”
Cho Youngran’s face was expressionless. Lee Sookyung opened her mouth.
“I…”
But no words would come out.
Suddenly, Cho Youngran grasped her hand. It gave her a strange feeling that she had only recognized when she began to be a mother. Dokja had been crying, and she went to hold his little fists. He was just a baby, he didn’t yet know how to fear things like story endings or drunk fathers, and she didn’t know what was wrong. She just knew she had to reach out to comfort him.
If we met again, would he let me reread for him, just once more? Would I still have the chance to be his family?
There were a lot of things she had not realized a mother should do, so she was not good at comforting Dokja—No, in the first place, she had never been good at comforting others. She really had failed her son. And it was a bit foolish—she had lived a decade more than the calloused hand that gently held hers now. Still, this younger woman understood. Cho Youngran, Lee Boksoon, all the other women who waited with her in the bread line every day… they all had regrets. They all had things they wanted to say.
Maybe I’m not the only one, Lee Sookyung thought.
,
That child, should she have continued telling him stories? Of course her boy accepted them more than the truth. Dokja-ya, there was a Greek hero named Perseus. Doomed by fate—still a baby—he and his mother were cast to sea in a wooden box. They tossed and tossed in the raging waters. Still, the gods blessed them to safety, and they lived happily together in the very end. But she had not told him. Because she didn’t know if the storm would stop. Because the only god a real-life child had was just his mother, because all gods that readers worshipped were liars. Because she had saved him by taking him with her into the waves. Because she had clutched him so tightly back then, and she did not know how to let him go but like this.