1942

(12 years later)

The mountains by the outskirts of Gyeongseong

Chanyeol wiped the sweat off his brow and went to get from his small pail of water to drink. He went back quickly to where he was training, and the old man Chanyeol was with smiled.

“Chanyeol, it’s almost dusk,” Dongho, Chanyeol’s senior in the rebellion, told him. “Your mom is going to kill me if you keep this up. Your mom will kill me twice if she finds out I’m not actually teaching you civil service!”

“Just say you ran out of bullets for our guns,” Chanyeol grinned. “I think I did better today. Tomorrow again?”

“You know, you really inherited Sungmin’s stubbornness,” Dongho sighed. “That, combined with Jihye’s assertiveness…” Chanyeol’s grin widened. “Fine. Tomorrow.”

“Thanks! See you tomorrow, old man!” Chanyeol left, going down the mountains with a gait in his step.

The sun was almost completely down, and if he didn’t hurry, his mom would kill him before she got to his trainer. Years – the mother and son duo fought for years – until Jihye finally relented, accepting that she wouldn’t be able to dissuade her son from joining the rebellion. Once Chanyeol turned eighteen, Jihye sat him down and made a deal with him: he could join the rebellion, as long as it’s only for their front, their ‘legal’ operations. No fights whatsoever. And definitely no guns.

But as the old man said – Chanyeol inherited his father’s stubbornness. He befriended the older men and women of the rebellion, those of the same age as his parents – and found one Kim Dongho, a close friend of his father’s when Sungmin was still alive. Dongho took to Chanyeol immediately; almost everyone did. They all felt sorry for Chanyeol and Jihye’s loss. Chanyeol, at some point, got sick of the looks of pity they gave him. They said he had too much of his father in him. Dongho was the only one who saw Chanyeol as his own person and agreed to train him on the ways of the Korean rebellion, and the old man promised he wouldn’t tell a word to Jihye.

Chanyeol had been training with Dongho for almost two years now; he was already twenty-five. By day, he helped maintain the everyday affairs of their household and the nobility that came with it – talking to civil servants and other people who approached them for help. They remained cordial with the colonizers, a skill that Chanyeol developed. He mostly gritted his teeth through his first years but became better through the years. If anything, he learned more about their ways, and he hoped that this would help him in the future. Whenever that was.

He wasn’t sure when the future he was preparing for will come. All he knew was that he had to help in the cause of freedom for Joseon. He had to continue his family’s tradition. He had to make his father proud.

Imperial government complex, Gyeongseong

“Stand up, you son of a !” a Japanese soldier kicked a Korean soldier down on the floor.

Seungwan was hiding from a dark, hidden corner – she only wanted to take a glimpse of how the soldiers were trained. She wanted to learn.

She saw something else entirely.

Seungwan knew that most Korean men were required to be conscripted for the imperial army to conquer the rest of Asia. Some of them were able to evade the responsibility, by way of nobility, connections, or payment, which meant that a lot of those who joined the army were poor. In a state of colonization, Koreans were treated as beneath the colonizers; and as Seungwan just saw – the poor were treated like they had no right to live.

She held back her tears when she heard the man’s wails from the ground. The more the man screamed, the more they kicked him back. Seungwan wanted to fight and stand up to the imperial soldier, but she wasn’t dumb. She would be killed in an instant.

She went quickly out of her hiding place, and back to the main streets, acting like a normal lady inside the imperial government complex. She made her way toward their house, pallid from what she just witnessed.

“Seungwan, where were you?!” Myunghoon sat up when he saw his daughter come in. “I asked Taehyung where you were, but he said you went out early.”

“He calls himself Yuuto, and he probably hates that you call him Taehyung,” Seungwan rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry, Papa. I was just… out.”

“It’s night! The sun’s been out for hours! You can’t keep doing this,” Myunghoon said, his eyebrows furrowed.

“It’s because you wouldn’t tell me anything!” Seungwan snapped, and Myunghoon was taken aback. His daughter never answered him back with that tone. He finally noticed how pale his daughter was.

“Seungwan, I’m sorry – what happened?”

For a moment, Seungwan debated whether to tell her father what she just witnessed or not, but her instinct got the better of her.

“They were killing him, for a show,” Seungwan muttered, staring into space. “They kicked him, he was spewing out blood, just to scare the others into subversion. They were about to kill a man, and they didn’t care.”

Myunghoon sighed inwardly. He did his best to shield Seungwan from the dark realities of their life in an occupied country, trying to reconcile living within the center of the government inflicting pain upon their people.

“Where were you?” Myunghoon asked.

“Really, Papa? That’s what you ask me? They’re killing us, and this is what you ask me—” Seungwan started to raise her voice.

“Seungwan, your voice,” Myunghoon warned. “They can hear us.”

Seungwan hated how cautious his father was. She was frustrated with her father, always keeping secrets from her. How could her father always say that he was fighting for Joseon, when he knew all these atrocities were happening within the walls of the government he was working for? How could he stomach the fact that he was helping the cause that left people hungry, left children without mothers and fathers?

“I’m tired, Papa. I’m tired,” Seungwan stood up and went to her small cot, lying down, trying not to think about what she witnessed earlier.

Myunghoon felt guilty: he knew he was keeping too much from his daughter for far too long. He thought he was being a good father from withholding information – he didn’t want his daughter to experience the pains of belonging to a rebellion. But he couldn’t shield his daughter away forever. He wished he could. He wished they were back in Pusan, playing around their small yard with Jangmi. He wished Jangmi were with them. She would’ve known what to do and what to say.

He took a deep breath. He stood up and went to sit down on the edge of his daughter’s cot.

“I only still work here because I have access to information that would be valuable for the rebellion,” Myunghoon started, in a quiet voice. “Yes, I do help them make weapons. They’ll do it even without me. It’s better that I know all their strengths and weaknesses and plans, so the rebellion knows.”

Seungwan opened her eyes slightly. She listened.

“Sometimes I try to steal little parts from the weapons and supply them to the rebell