Book Review: “Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age – In South Korea’s Prisons”

Our Town downtown
July 9, 2007

“Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age – In South Korea’s Prisons”
By Cullen Thomas
Viking
Hardcover ($24.95)
347 pp.

I’ve often wondered whether I’m the only one who has difficulty staying focused on books or movies that take place entirely in one setting—in a mental ward, on a bus, around a kitchen table, or maybe in someone’s office—or whether it’s a consequence of being born in a generation whose members expect images to flicker and flit along in from them just as quickly as they arrive on screen. I suspect it’s a combination, something both organic and circumstantial.

Whatever the cause, if the action isn’t packed-in, the characters aren’t larger than life, and the dialogue doesn’t snap, crackle and pop, drones like us float off into a parallel universe.
Prison stories can be difficult to bring to life, because like prisoners, and so many plays, they are usually confined to one, narrow setting. They seem to beg for flashbacks. Otherwise, all that’s left, in many cases, are the innovative methods inmates devise to pass notes, smuggle in contraband and fashion weapons from common items. For the most part, Cullen Thomas avoids this in his memoir of spending much of his twenties in a Korean prison.

After getting caught sending himself hashish from the Philippines, Thomas, then a 23-year-old English teacher in Seoul, receives a three and a half-year sentence and serves all of it. He is from the generation, a.k.a “Generation X,” just before mine. But his initial impulse to leave his recently-graduated slacker’s life in New York, for South Korea, sounds like it’s motivated by the same restlessness, that perceived-need for constant stimulation, that characterizes many of my generation. It also characterizes his vision of the vagabond’s unburdened life. And he sets out for Asia, delighted at the prospect of resurrecting the “Jolly Marauder,” an alter-ego he and his brother created when they were kids, “a kind of half-pirate, half-noble adventurer.”

After his unsuccessful foray into drug-trafficking (he is successful in concealing his intent to distribute from the prosecutor, and spares himself more time), Thomas gets a preview of what prison could mean, during an interrogation, when an agent zaps him with what sounds like a cattle prod, and a prosecutor urges him to confess to avoid a 10-year sentence. But the mini-electrocution is not characteristic of his overall treatment, unless Thomas is leaving out other instances of physical abuse; during the interrogation, Thomas realizes for the first time, the relative privileges an American in a foreign country, in legal trouble, enjoys with the local authorities. “The agent at my side says nothing; he just sits there and menaces … I’m lucky that’s all it is. A Korean would have been beaten; other foreigners were, and worse.”

But being American doesn’t exempt him from the underlying codes of behavior that govern the prisoners’ lives. Confucianism, with its emphasis on keeping appearances, respecting elders and maintaining hierarchies, applies just as it would on the outside.

When Thomas erupts after a gangster cutting his hair takes off more than Thomas expects, the gangster, exasperated, replies that “prisoners heads are shaved; it is prison law.”

“That the Koreans didn’t rebel much I understood. I’d been observing their Confucian codes and the ways in which they were intensified in prison. Those codes were strong on obedience, acquiescence, hierarchies that the Koreans couldn’t escape. They were bound together by strong ropes of pride and shame,” Thomas writes.

As Westerners must adapt to collective societies like Korea, it’s doubly so for prisoners there, judging by his experience. “Shame, success, blame, and punishment were shared by all.” While foreign prisoners are held in single cells, Koreans live squeezed together in theirs. Although not all the foreigners are Westerners, to Thomas, this set-up reflects their respective cultures.
During his stay at the Seoul Detention Center, and then at two prisons after his sentencing, he is subjected to sleep deprivation; life in tiny one-man cells, where prisoners stay for 23 hours a day; exposure to the elements; polluted water and generally unsanitary living conditions, minimal nourishment; inadequate medical care and serious limits on communication with the outside world.

But Thomas concedes that despite everything he has to endure, he’d rather do his time in Korea than in the United States. “If I had to be imprisoned, it was my good fortune it was in Confucian Korea … No doubt my life [in an American prison] would have been more comfortable in many ways … but also seedier, I’m pretty sure, more decadent, and more dangerous … In Korea I didn’t have to constantly think about my survival, about being raped or assaulted.” He thinks it also because of Korea’s homogenous prison population. “Korea’s one race has been marinating in a code of behavior and propriety and well-defined roles for centuries … [America has] no uniform code. It’s a cauldron of competing codes … some brilliant life gets born out of her complexity and chaos. But so do some scary prisons.”

His fellow inmates, some of them his friends, include killers, thieves, gangsters and rapists. They help him accept that he is a convict and a prisoner, and to understand how to make his time as bearable as possible. Once an English major at the State University of New York at Binghamton, the classic books family and friends send him add to his understanding of the situation he’s in, and of himself. The textual references he makes are appropriate, and there are just enough of them to enhance the details without sounding pretentious.

To get more time outside of his four-foot-wide cell, Thomas eventually elects to work in an on-site shoe factory, and he becomes a basketball star on the factory team. Work, basketball and teaching English keep him sane, and his outlook gradually transforms. He appreciates his old life more, his family and friends. And instead of rage, he begins to feel acceptance, and even at times, opportunity – the opportunity to face himself, and to see a part of Korea few foreigners seeking to understand it ever get to. Having spent formative years there, he is more mature and more thoughtful.

He brings up the idea that Confucianism is behind the various things he observes, so often that, at times, it’s hard not to wonder whether he’s over-generalizing, and whether more complex forces, either by themselves or in concert with Confucianism, are at work.

Thomas is at his best when describing what’s going on inside his head, the prison friendships he forges, which would probably be unthinkable anywhere else (one with an American child-killer comes to mind), and keeping everything in context.

There are moments, descriptions of the routines of his monotonous captivity that may make The Latest Generation antsy. But all in all Thomas provides a credible account of a worst-case scenario with a good mix of flashbacks, anthropological observations and self-analysis.

It would be easy to write off Thomas as a privileged kid from the suburbs who has committed a frivolous, unnecessary crime, and after all, is serving three and a half years, in a place where many others will never see the outside world again. But as he points out, referring to Nazi concentration camp survivor’s Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” “suffering in a man is like gas in an enclosed space; regardless of the volume of gas, a little or a lot, it will spread out to fill the space evenly,” and “each man … regardless of how his fate,” matches “up with the rest,” feels “his [suffering] painfully and intensely.”

melzweig@manhattanmedia.com