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already sentenced to death—they can’t very well increase his penalty. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but these death row inmates will be the death of me. It makes no difference to them if they kill another person while they’re in here, because they know it won’t change their sentence. They’re on death row, so what difference does it make
how
they die. The other prisoners are scared of them, so they act like kings. There hasn’t been an execution since lastAugust, and they can tell another one is coming. That’s probably why they get more violent at the end of the year. That’s when the executions usually take place. Afterward, they quiet down for a few months. But Yunsu is the worst of them all.”
    Aunt Monica was quiet for a moment.
    “Nevertheless,” she said, “he came to see me today. And though he doesn’t write back very often, he does write back.”
    Aunt Monica was like a detective desperately clinging to a tiny clue. The guard smirked.
    “To be honest, I was surprised he came to see you. Last month, the pastor gave him a Bible. He ripped it apart and has been using the pages as toilet paper. I think he’s gone through three Bibles that way.”
    I burst out laughing. If Aunt Monica hadn’t glared at me, I would have kept on laughing, but I shut my mouth and tried to look serious. It served her right. I felt like Yunsu had gotten revenge on my behalf for the way Aunt Monica kept mentioning the word
garbage
to me on the way there. He had torn up her favorite thing in the whole world, the Bible, and turned it into something even worse than garbage. But I couldn’t let on how satisfying it was to hear that. They both looked so serious.
    “This morning, I went to his cell and told him you were coming and asked what he wanted to do. He thought about it for a moment and then asked how old you were. I told him you were in your seventies. He hesitated again, and then for some reason, he said he would come meet you.”
    A look of joy stole over Aunt Monica’s face.
    “Did he? They say good things happen when you get old. I guess it’s true. But, has anyone been to see him?”
    “No. He might be an orphan. I think he said his mother is alive somewhere, but no one visits.”
    Aunt Monica took a white envelope from her pocket.
    “Please add this to his commissary account. And please, Officer Yi, don’t think too badly of him. Guards are also supposed to help rehabilitate them. You’re not trying to kill him faster, are you? Aren’t we all sinners in the end?”
    Officer Yi took the envelope but did not say a word. On the way back to the subway station, Aunt Monica adamantly refused my offer to drive her all the way to the convent. I didn’t understand why she insisted on taking public transportation on such a cold day, but it was probably the pointless stubbornness that she and I shared.
    While we were waiting for the light to change at an intersection, I asked, “What did he do?” There wasn’t anything else to talk about. She seemed lost in thought and did not answer.
    “Did they put those shackles on him because he was meeting with us?”
    “No, he wears those all the time.”
    My heart sank just as it had when I saw him hunch over to eat the pastry. In the old folktale Chunhyangjeon, when the title character Chunhyang sits shackled in a wooden cangue, she looks plaintive and wistful, and perhaps even dignified. But that was just a narrative device, the more tragic the better, to set up the dramatic turn of justice when her beloved Mongnyong returns as a secret royal inspector and saves her from the lecherous local magistrate who imprisoned her for refusing his advances. Nowadays, with the twenty-first century just around the corner, the idea of keeping someone shackled around the clock was shocking.
    “What about when he sleeps?”
    “He wears them when he sleeps, too. Their only wish is to sleep with their arms outstretched just once. Some inmates have even broken their arms