Memoir of an American in Korean Prison: Cullen Thomas

Cullen Thomas' memoir "Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons" has attracted the attention of newspapers worldwide last year. In a recent interview with major Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo, Mr. Thomas said that at first, he was hesitant to publish the story, “but in the end, I felt as though I had an inspirational and positive story to tell. I didn’t want it to be a typical prison account. I hoped that people would see the humanity and worth and interest in the experience."

As a child on suburban Long Island, Cullen Thomas devoured Tintin comic books and the tales of Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian explorer. He thirsted for high adventure in foreign parts. At age 23, he got it: a sentence of three and a half years in South Korean prisons for mailing himself a kilogram of hashish.

“Brother One Cell” is Mr. Thomas’s affecting account of his prison experience. It’s an offbeat coming-of-age story, the tale of a wide-eyed, innocent, middle-class American thrust into a world of deprivation and daily trials that speed his passage into adulthood and a deeper understanding of himself and the fallen creatures around him.

Cullen Thomas recalls the experience in "Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons", his 2007 memoir which has attracted the attention of newspapers worldwide:

Korea was an accident. At loose ends after college, he joined a friend in Seoul who assured him that there was good money to be made teaching English. This turned out to be true, but he quickly grew restless.

After all those dull months teaching English to Korean students, Mr. Thomas suddenly finds himself among fascinating people. He meets Billy the Kid, a Colombian gem smuggler and jailhouse lawyer with whom he reads Nietzsche and Tolstoy, and develops a philosophy for dealing with prison life. He listens in wonder to the exploits of a Peruvian who wanders the world with a gang of well-dressed thieves who steal suitcases in hotels and airports. He befriends, and tries to understand, a fellow American who has smothered his two sons.

Alone in his cell, Mr. Thomas struggles with shame, self-doubt, soul-destroying boredom and a long list of fundamental life questions that most people are too busy to address. He is afraid, lonely and angry. He cries and he rages. “I saw myself variously as an idiot and a clown, then an alchemist who might turn isolation into strength, then a cipher, a shut-out,” he writes.

His American citizenship gives him status. So does his language, which all Koreans, even the guards, are eager to learn. At the same time, as one of perhaps a hundred foreign prisoners in Korea, he is culturally isolated, confused by a language he speaks with difficulty and a system of cultural norms that baffle him.


Nothing much happens in prison, but the details are fascinating. As Mr. Thomas describes it, violence is limited to occasional scuffles, and the atmosphere of terror and intimidation in American prisons is absent. Although consensual sex occurs, usually for pay, rape is unknown. It’s no “Midnight Express.” In an unspoken arrangement, gangs keep order in exchange for privileges. (Though according to Chosun writer, Mr. Thomas affectionately described scenes of everyday life in jail in his book: a father and a son washing each other's back in the bath, 50-something prison inmates maintaining the rigid seniority of Korean society, inmates sharing meals.)

The physical conditions, however, are harsh. In winter, water freezes in unheated cells, and so does the ink in Mr. Thomas’s pen. The diet leans heavily on low-quality rice and kimchi, the famous Korean condiment of spicy pickled cabbage. Dirty electric razors leave Mr. Thomas with painful boils on his face, and by the end of his term he develops parasites.

He does not complain. Quite the contrary. “I didn’t mind having few possessions, and could see the value in being removed from the noise and consumption of the outside world,” he writes. He and his fellow prisoners, he reflects wryly, live a model lifestyle, “like progressive ascetics.”

Mr. Thomas learned basic Korean phrases and expressions, and part of the Korean national anthem. He still keeps his old passport with the Korean visa, and a portrait of him drawn by one of the inmates at the Daejeon prison.

Like Solzhenitsyn’s Denisovich, Mr. Thomas finds a grim satisfaction in work. He is happy to cobble shoes for the Korean riot police at the rate of 80 cents a day. Even better than the loose camaraderie and open spaces of the factory floor is the prison sports program. Each factory has a basketball team, and Mr. Thomas, a first-round draft pick, emerges as the Michael Jordan of the South Korean penal system. The rules combine the N.B.A. and Confucius. When Mr. Thomas is tackled on a drive to the basket, no one seems to regard this as a foul, but the players can see that he is upset. As a face-saving solution, he is awarded four free throws.

Explaining his criticism of the Korean judicial system in the book, Mr. Thomas told Chosun Ilbo, "I would say that justice and punishment have to be smart, not just strong. The emphasis should be on smart. Strong usually comes easier to authorities. I would also say that the law was right in my case. People do need to be punished, controlled, taught lessons sometimes. There must be law and order."

Mr. Thomas is not a deep or complex thinker. Sincerity and earnestness are his strong points. A romantic to the end, he confronts his situation with Thoreau ready to hand, drawing simple conclusions from hard lessons, taking pleasure in small things, and appreciating the unexpected turn his life has taken. “I was at the end of the earth,” he reflects toward the end of his prison term. Like his hero Burton, he writes, “I’d entered a forbidden city, lived among a bizarre and wondrous people, gained knowledge of a province previously unknown to my race.”

Splendid. But Mom adds a badly needed coda. On greeting her son at the airport in New York, she cries, hugs him and holds him at arm’s length to take a good look. Then she slaps him and says, “Don’t ever do that again.”

Source: Chosun, NYTimes
Pic from Cullenthomas.com