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Chapter 6 (#ulink_eea551a1-61ef-59d6-9dbf-6cabe4840f88)
The red shoes (#ulink_eea551a1-61ef-59d6-9dbf-6cabe4840f88)
I was very excited about the move to Hamhung, on the east coast. At that time Hamhung was a major industrial hub, famous as a centre for the production of Vinylon – a synthetic fibre, used in uniforms, that was invented in North Korea. It was an achievement we were so proud of that patriotic songs were sung about it. It held dye badly, shrank easily, was stiff and uncomfortable to wear, but it was marvellously flame-resistant. The city also boasted many restaurants and a grand new theatre – the largest in North Korea.
I couldn’t stop pointing at the numbers of vehicles everywhere; there were far more than in Anju, and more bicycles, too. The streets were broad, grand boulevards with trolley buses that trailed sparks from the overhead cables, and the buildings weren’t so shabby. The air was badly polluted, however. On some mornings the sky had a sulphurous yellow tint and stank of chemicals from the vast Hungnam ammonium fertilizer complex, which the Great Leader himself had visited several times and delivered on-the-spot guidance. His words were everywhere, on red-painted placards throughout the city, carved on stone plaques, and in letters six feet high on the side of Mount Tonghung. His image was omnipresent, in murals of coloured glass, in statues of marble and bronze, in portraits on the sides of buildings, which depicted him as soldier or scientist; as stern ideologue or jovial friend of children.
Despite my father’s high rank in the air force the accommodation was barely adequate. This time our home was on another military base in a six-storey concrete apartment block with no elevator. We had three rooms and cold running water. It was decorated with yellowed wallpaper, which my mother immediately had changed for a better-quality washable type. She had the bathroom walls tiled blue. In winter the pipes froze; in summer mould would turn the outside walls black.
I was very lucky, however, although I still did not fully understand quite how lucky. My father’s rank not only gave him access to goods many people didn’t have, but he received a lot of food and household items as gifts and bribes.
In theory the government provided for everyone’s needs – food, fuel, housing and clothing – through the Public Distribution System. The quality and the amount you received depended on the importance of your work. Twice a month your workplace provided you with ration coupons to exchange for the goods. Until a few years previously, the Party had still seriously been thinking of abolishing money. When the system actually worked, money was only needed as pocket money, or for the beauty parlour. But most of the time, the communist central planning system was so inefficient that it frequently broke down, rations dwindled or disappeared through theft, and people relied more and more on bribery or on unofficial markets for their essentials – for which cash, and often hard foreign currency, not the Korean won, was required.
We ate out quite often at restaurants that served naengmyeon, for which Hamhung is famous. These are noodles served in an ice-cold beef broth with a tangy sauce, although there are many variations. My mother would eat naengmyeon with her eyes closed in pure pleasure. She loved it to the point of addiction.
On Sundays, I played with neighbourhood girl friends outside on the concrete forecourt of our apartment block. We would skip or play a type of hopscotch called sabanchigi.
For the other six days of the week I was either at school or busy with school-related activities. It wasn’t just the children’s time that got filled up. Everyone – factory workers, cadres, soldiers, dock workers, farmers, teachers, housewives, pensioners, and my parents included – was kept constantly busy with some kind of after-hours organizational meeting or mind-numbing activity, such as ideological ‘study groups’ or ‘discussions’, which often involved memorizing the speeches of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, or attending lectures that could last for hours after work, on everything from the revolutionary history of the early Party and new techniques for pig rearing, to hydroelectric power and the poetry of Kim Jong-il. This was part of the communist way – to ensure that no one could ever deviate into a selfish, individualistic or private life – but it was also a system of surveillance. Perpetual communal participation meant that the hours in each day when we were not being watched, by someone, were few.
I had begun elementary school in Anju, but now I had to join a new one in Hamhung, which filled me with apprehension. My mother had real trouble getting me to enter the building on my first day. The children seemed rough, and had a different accent; there was no ‘village’ feel as there had been at the school in Anju. Banners in the school corridors made our priorities clear: ‘Let us study for our country!’ and ‘Always be on the alert for Marshal Kim Il-sung!’
But I was outgoing, and curious about my new classmates. I soon made some good friends among the girls. That came from the confidence a loving family gave me.
It was at school in Hamhung that I received my initiation into ‘life purification time’, or self-criticism sessions. These have been a basic feature of life in North Korea since they were introduced by Kim Jong-il in 1974, and are the occasions almost everyone dreads. They start in elementary school and continue throughout a person’s life. Ours were held every Friday, and involved my entire class of forty students. Our teacher presided. Everyone took turns to stand up, accuse someone, and confess something. No one was excused for shyness. No one was allowed to be blameless.
It must have been humiliating and painful for the adults, standing up to criticize a colleague for some work-related or personal failing in front of the whole workforce. But there was only so much for which young children could be held guilty. The atmosphere in class was deadly serious. The teacher would not tolerate the mildest levity, even though the accusations were often ludicrous. The formula was to open the session with a commandment from Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il and then stand up and accuse the child who had violated it. When the accusations started to fly and fingers started to point, this was the only time, ironically, that we called each other ‘comrade’.
These sessions could create an atmosphere of great fear and bitterness, even among children. But often, through a humanity we all possess, adults and children alike would find ways of taking the poison out of them. If I couldn’t face accusing someone I’d sometimes accuse myself, which was permitted. Or a friend and I would strike a deal where she would criticize me one week, and I would criticize her the following week with some prearranged made-up charge. And so my friend would stand and say: ‘Our Respected Father Leader said that children must focus on their studies with dedication in their hearts and a clear mind.’ Then she’d point at me. ‘In the last week I have noticed that Comrade Park is not listening in class.’ I would hang my head and try to look chastened. The next week would be my turn. That way we stayed friends. My mother would make a similar pact with colleagues at her workplace; so did Min-ho when he got to elementary school. The sessions taught me a survival lesson. I had to be discreet, be cautious about what I said and did, and be very wary of others. Already I was acquiring the mask that the adults wore from long practice.
Often, students would find themselves criticized unexpectedly. When this happened, they took revenge. In rare cases, it could be lethal. On one occasion, in my final year of secondary school, a boy in my class pointed at another boy and said: ‘When I went to your house, I saw that you had many things you didn’t have before. Where did you get the money to pay for them?’ The teacher reported the criticism to the headmaster, who reported it to the Bowibu. They investigated and found that the family had a son who had escaped the country and was sending them money from South Korea. Three generations of the family were arrested as traitors.
Like the ever-present danger of informers, I took the self-criticism sessions to be part of normal life. But I also had the sense there was nothing positive about them; they were entirely negative.
The biggest milestone of my youth came at the age of nine, in Hamhung. With all other children my age, I entered the Young Pioneer Corps, North Korea’s communist youth movement. Ceremonies were held at schools all over the country on the same day, with parents and teachers assembling at large public places for the occasion. This is considered one of the proudest days in a North Korean’s life.
Joining the Pioneers is compulsory between the ages of nine and fourteen, but not everyone is accepted at the same time. First, there is a formidable test of memorizing: I had to show that I’d learned the Young Pioneer’s rights and duties by heart. From now on, I followed the orders of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, no matter where, no matter what. I must think and act in accordance with their teachings. I must reject and denounce anyone who directed me to do anything against their will. I was good at memorizing, and passed the test easily. And as I’d done well in the most important subjects on the school curriculum – the revolutionary history of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il – I was selected for the first induction ceremony of the year, on Kim Jong-il’s birthday, 16 February, in 1989.
A few days before the ceremony my mother bought me a pair of new shoes especially for the occasion. They were foreign-made and from a dollar store – a special shop for people who had access to foreign currency and wanted to spend it. I was so excited about these shoes that, in order to calm me down, she let me take a peek at them. They were patent-leather Mary Janes, fastened with a buckle, and were a luscious deep red – nothing like the cheap state-issue shoes we all wore, and which only came in black. My mother wouldn’t let me take them out of the box until the night before the ceremony.
At the ceremony we were to receive a red cotton scarf and a small silver Pioneer badge to pin on our blouses. To me the scarf was the mark of a grown-up and meant that I was no longer a kid. But this excitement was displaced unexpectedly by my anticipation of the red shoes. The wait was agonizing. The night before the ceremony I slept with them next to me on the bed – I woke a few times to check they were still there.
When the morning came at last I was ecstatic. The event was held in my school hall. The walls were adorned for the occasion with paintings and collages that the children had made – of the secret guerrilla base in the forests of Mount Paektu where the Dear Leader was born, and of the new star that had appeared in the heavens on the night of his birth. Amplified speeches boomed from the headmaster and the teachers on the stage, whose centrepiece was an enormous bouquet of kimjongilia, a fleshy red begonia that is the flower of Kim Jong-il. Everyone then stood to sing the ‘Song of General Kim Jong-il’, and finally the Pioneers stepped up to the stage to receive, with great solemnity, their scarves and badges. The parents in the audience applauded each one.
I walked up to receive mine, bursting with pride for my red shoes. It surprises me now to think that there were no repercussions. All present in the school hall must have noticed them. It did not strike me until years later what an unusual gift they were. Most kids at the ceremony – several hundred of them – were wearing the state-issue black shoes. My mother was a cautious woman, but, consciously or not, she was encouraging a distinct individualism in me.
We took many group photos and family photos. It was a proud day for my parents. My father wore his air force uniform. My mother was carrying Min-ho, aged two.
Classmates not selected for that day’s ceremony had to wait until the next ceremony on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, 15 April.
One girl I was friendly with had not been accepted for the February induction and was often absent from class. For some reason our teacher decided that she and some of the girl’s friends should visit the girl’s home to see if she was all right. It was in a run-down area of the city where hoodlums hung about. The housing was very squalid. Our visit was a terrible mistake. Her house was bare, and smelled of sewage. She had obviously hoped to hide her poverty from us, but there we were, crowded into one of her two small rooms, staring at our feet while our teacher, flushed with embarrassment, suggested to her mother that our friend should try to attend school every day.
The experience was deeply confusing for me. I knew there were degrees of privilege, but we were also equal citizens in the best country in the world. The Leaders were dedicating their lives to providing for all of us. Weren’t they?
Schooling in North Korea is free, though in reality parents are perpetually being given quotas for donations of goods, which the school sells to pay for facilities. My friend had not been attending because her parents could not afford these donations. None of us was cynical enough to realize that our schooling was not really free at all. The donations were a patriotic duty – rabbit-fur for the gloves and hats of the soldiers who kept us safe; scrap iron for their guns, copper for their bullets; mushrooms and berries as foreign currency-earning exports. Sometimes a child would be criticized by the teacher in front of the class for not bringing in the quota.
In early 1990, when I was ten years old, my father announced that we were moving again, this time back to Hyesan. My mother had had enough of the pollution and grind of life in Hamhung, and missed her family and the clean air. She did not think an industrial city was a good place to bring up Min-ho. Once again, we looked forward to the move. My parents talked incessantly of Hyesan and of the people there.
We were going home.
Min-ho, my mother, and I all waved goodbye to my father, and to Hamhung, from the train window. My father would follow in a day or two. That journey home would not have stuck in my mind but for a drama we experienced on the way that made a lasting impression on my mother and me.
On the way north we had to change trains at a town called Kil-ju on the east coast. Train stations in North Korea have a rigorous inspection of travellers’ documents, with passengers often having to pass through cordons of police and ticket inspectors. No one can board a train without a travel permit stamped in their ID passbook, together with a train ticket, which is valid for four days only. The documentation is then checked all over again at the destination station. A woman ticket inspector examined my mother’s ticket and told her brusquely that it had expired. She was the type of official most North Koreans are familiar with – a mini Great Leader when in uniform. She took my mother’s ID passbook and ticket and told her to wait.
My mother’s face fell into her hands. Now we had a problem. She would have to get permission from Hamhung again before we could buy new tickets. That would take time and she had two children in tow, and luggage. We were stranded. Min-ho was crying loudly. My mother took him off her back and held him and together we slumped onto a bench inside the station. I held her hand. We must have looked a desolate bunch, because a middle-aged man in the grey cap and uniform of the Korean State Railway came up to us and smiled. He asked what the matter was. My mother explained, and he went to the ticket inspector’s office. The woman was not there, but he brought back my mother’s ticket and ID passbook, and gave them to her.
In a low voice he said: ‘When the train stops, jump on. But if she comes looking for you, hide.’
My mother was so grateful that she asked for his address so that she could send him something.
He held up his palms. ‘No time for that.’
The train was creaking into the station, bringing with it a reek of latrines and soldered steel. It screeched to a stop and the doors began flying open.
We boarded. The carriage was crowded. My mother quickly explained our predicament to the passengers and asked if we could crouch down behind them. Sure enough, a minute later we heard the voice of the ticket inspector, asking people on the platform about us. Next thing we knew she had entered the carriage.
‘Have you seen a woman with a baby and a little girl?’ She was shouting. ‘Did she get on the train?’
‘Yes.’ Two of the passengers in front of us said this in unison. ‘They went that way.’
The woman got off, still looking left and right for us. We heard her asking more people on the platform. We were holding our breath. Why wasn’t the train moving? A minute seemed to pass. Finally we heard the shrill note of a whistle. The train shunted forward, couplings banging together. My mother looked at me and finally exhaled. She’d been terrified Min-ho would start bawling again.
Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all. The episode was so unusual that my mother was to recall it many times, saying how thankful she was to that man, and to the passengers. A few years later, when the country entered its darkest period, we would remember him. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_21c0155a-4b33-557d-a65e-086cc7c8cfa5)
Boomtown (#ulink_21c0155a-4b33-557d-a65e-086cc7c8cfa5)
Our new home in Hyesan was another house allocated to us by the military. Our neighbours were other military officials and their families. The accommodation was good by North Korean standards. It had two rooms and a squat toilet. The heating in the floor was piping hot, making the glue beneath the reja – a kind of linoleum – give off a smell like mushrooms, but the building was poorly insulated. In winter we’d have warm backsides and freezing noses. We had to boil water when we wanted a hot bath.
My mother did her usual makeover, replacing the wallpaper and the furniture. She didn’t mind. She was thrilled to be back in Hyesan and reconnected with our family social circles. We felt settled.
Hyesan had been booming in the years we’d been away. The illicit trade coming over the border from China seemed greater than ever and my mother wanted to get in on some deals. She had found a job with a local government bureau, but her salary, as with all state jobs, was negligible. She wanted to make serious money, like Aunt Pretty, Uncle Money and Uncle Opium.
It seemed that everything was available in Hyesan – from high-value liquor and expensive foreign perfume to Western-brand clothing and Japanese electronics – at a price. Smugglers brought goods from the county of Changbai, on the Chinese side, across the narrow, shallow river for collection by a Korean contact, or across the Changbai–Hyesan International Bridge (known to locals as the Friendship Bridge). Illegal trade across the bridge required bribing the North Korean customs officials; smuggling across the river required bribing the border guards. When the river froze solid in winter smugglers crept over the ice; the rest of the year they waded across at night, or in broad daylight, if the guards at key points had been bribed and were in on the deal.
We could see the prosperity. This would not have been at all obvious to outsiders, since North Koreans are poor and do not wish to draw the state’s attention. Anyone looking across from China would have seen a city in deep blackout at night, with a few kerosene lamps flickering in windows, and a colourless, drab place by day, with people cycling joylessly to work. But the signs were all around us. The special hotel for foreigners, where our parents sometimes took Min-ho and me for an overnight stay as a treat (the manager was a friend of my mother’s), was always full with Chinese business people. In the morning we’d join them for breakfast but never talk to them, in case any informers or Bowibu agents were listening. The city’s dollar store, opposite Hyesan Station, had plenty of customers spending hard currency on goods not obtainable anywhere else, and certainly not through the state’s Public Distribution System. Going there was like being admitted into a magical cavern. I couldn’t believe how brightly the goods were packaged – foreign-made cookies and chocolates in wrappers of silver and purple that made them irresistibly tempting, and fruit juices – orange, apple, grape – in clear bottles marked with Western letters, that came from some faraway land of plenty. Outside the store, a few illegal moneychangers hung about like flies. My mother walked straight past them and would have nothing to do with them, saying they swindled people by wrapping newsprint into a bundle and putting a few genuine notes on top, knowing that anyone illegally trying to change money couldn’t complain. The state beauty parlour was always fully booked, with women having their hair permed (not dyed, which was prohibited), and the state restaurants were doing a roaring trade. Most significantly, business was brisk and busy at the open-air local markets.
Markets occupy an ambiguous place in North Korean society. The government tried several times to ban them altogether, or narrowly restrict their opening times, since Kim Jong-il, who was now effectively running the country for his father, declared that they were breeding grounds for every type of unsocialist practice. (He was right about that.) But he couldn’t abolish them while the Public Distribution System kept breaking down or failing to provide people with sufficient essentials. Occasionally, during some crackdown ordered by Pyongyang, the markets would be closed without notice, only to sprout up again within days, like sturdy and fertile weeds. The rules for market traders changed as often as the wind. For many years it was illegal to sell rice because rice was sacred and a gift of the Great Leader. But when I went to the markets, quite regularly with my mother, rice was for sale, along with meat, vegetables, kitchenware, and also Chinese fashions, cosmetics and – concealed beneath mats at enormous personal risk to vendor and buyer alike – cassette tapes of foreign pop music. Goods from Japan were considered the best quality. Next were South Korean products (with the archenemy’s labels and trademarks carefully removed), and lastly Chinese.
My mother wasted no time. Soon she had made contacts among the Chinese traders just across the river in Changbai and was arranging for goods to be sent over, which she would sell on, and make a nice profit. Her chief trading partners were a Mr Ahn and a Mr Chang, both Korean-Chinese, who had houses on the Chinese side of the riverbank.
It was in connection with my mother’s thriving business activities that she took me to a fortune-teller in the second year after we arrived back in Hyesan.
We woke extremely early, while it was still dark. My father and Min-ho were asleep. It was spring, and vivid green shoots were starting to sprout along the empty dirt streets. We hurried to the station to catch the first commuter train for Daeoh-cheon, the village where the fortune-teller woman lived.
My mother knew a number of these mystics and spent a lot of money on them. I was irritable about being woken so early, but she told me that the channel to the spirits is clearest at dawn. ‘She’ll be more accurate.’
My mother also wanted to beat the queue. Sometimes she’d arrive to find the fortune-teller out. A neighbour would say she’d been driven away in a Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows, for a discreet session with a high-ranking Party cadre. North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice.
The fortune-teller’s house was very old. Single-storey, and wood-framed with walls of mud and a thatched roof. I hadn’t known that such houses still existed. It was at a tilt and smelled damp. The lady was elderly, with thick, dishevelled hair. She was raising a granddaughter on her own.
‘I have a question about trade,’ my mother said in a whisper. ‘My Chinese partner has goods. I wish to know when to receive them.’
In other words, she wanted to know the best day to smuggle and not get into trouble. Sometimes, if the date was already fixed, my mother would pay for a ceremony to ward off bad luck.
The lady spilled a fistful of rice on the tabletop and used her fingernails to separate individual grains into portions. She examined this little pile intensely, then she started to speak in a rapid patter. I couldn’t tell if she was addressing us, or the spirits. She spoke of the day on which it was most propitious to receive the goods.
‘When you leave the house that morning, you must step out with your left foot first. Then spread some salt around and pray to the mountain spirit for good fortune.’
My mother nodded. She was satisfied.
‘This is my daughter,’ she said, and told her the time and date of my birth. The fortune-teller looked straight at me in a way that unnerved me. Then she closed her eyes theatrically.
‘Your daughter is clever,’ she said. ‘She has a future connected with music. She will eat foreign rice.’
As we walked back to the station the sun was coming up and the air was beautifully clear and crisp. The crags at the tops of the mountains were etched sharply against the sky but a white mist lingered in the foothills among the pines. My mother walked slowly down the dirt track, holding my hand. She was thinking about the prediction. She interpreted ‘foreign rice’ to mean that I would live overseas. Then she sighed, realizing she’d probably wasted her money. No ordinary North Koreans were allowed to travel abroad, let alone emigrate. That’s how it was with fortune-tellers. They told you things and you chose what you believed. But despite my scepticism about predicting dates for smuggling, I was more accepting of what the woman had said about me. I too thought my future was in music. I had been learning the accordion from a private tutor and was good at it. Accordion playing is popular in North Korea, a legacy from the end of the Second World War when our half of the peninsula was filled with Russian troops of the Soviet Red Army, although the Party never acknowledged any foreign influence on our culture. I thought the old woman’s prophecy meant that I would have a career as a professional accordionist and marry someone from another province. Maybe I would live in Pyongyang. That would be a dream come true. Only privileged people lived there. I fantasized about this for weeks until an event occurred that obliterated my daydreams and cast a shadow over my whole childhood.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_769259b1-e672-5db4-aa69-750183686fd6)
The secret photograph (#ulink_769259b1-e672-5db4-aa69-750183686fd6)
A few months after the visit to the fortune-teller, during the summer school vacation, my mother had taken Min-ho somewhere and had left me at my grandmother’s house for the day. She was a fascinating woman, intelligent, and always full of stories. Her silver hair was pinned back in the old Korean style, with a needle through the bun. On this particular visit, however, she told me a story that devastated me.
To this day I’m not sure why she did it. She wasn’t being mischievous. And I don’t think her mind was weakening, making her forgetful of what should stay secret. The only explanation I can think of is that she thought I should know the truth while I was young, because I’d find it easier to come to terms with as a girl than if I discovered it later, as a grown woman. If that’s what she was thinking, she made a terrible misjudgement.
It was a warm Saturday morning and the door and windows were open. Outside in the yard, jays were chirping and drinking water from a bowl. We were sitting at her table when she began looking at me with an odd intensity. She said softly: ‘You know, your father isn’t your real father.’
I didn’t take in what she’d said.
She reached across and squeezed my hand. ‘Your name is Kim. Not Park.’
There was a long pause. I didn’t see where this was going, but I might have smiled uncertainly. This could be one of her jokes. Like my mother, she had quite a sense of humour.
Seeing my confusion, she said: ‘It’s the truth.’
She stood and went over to the glass cabinet where she kept her best bowls and plates. It had a small drawer in the bottom. She bent down stiffly. At the back of her neck I could see the string on which she kept her Party card. She retrieved a cardboard envelope, and handed it to me. It smelled damp.
‘Open it.’
I put my hand inside and pulled out a black and white photograph. It showed a wedding party. I recognized my mother at once. She was the bride in the centre, wearing a beautiful chima jeogori. But the scene didn’t make sense. The groom next to her was not my father. He was tall and handsome with slicked-back hair, and dressed in a Western-style suit. Behind them was a vast bronze statue of Kim Il-sung, arm outstretched, as if giving traffic directions.
My grandmother pointed to the groom in the suit. ‘That’s your father. And this lady …’ She pointed to a beautiful woman to the man’s right. ‘… is his sister – your aunt. She’s a film actress in Pyongyang. You strongly resemble her.’ She sighed. ‘Your real father was a nice man, and he loved you a lot.’
The room seemed to go dim. Whatever tethered me to reality had just been cut. I was floating in unreality, and deeply confused.
She explained that my mother had loved my father so much that she could not live with the man she’d married, my biological father. She’d divorced him.
My father is not my father? My eyes started brimming with tears. How could she say that?
I said nothing. She seemed to read the next question forming in my mind. I couldn’t open my mouth to ask it. I think if I’d opened my mouth I would have fallen apart.
‘Min-ho is your half-brother,’ she said, nodding.
I stared at her, but she ploughed on.
‘A couple of years ago, when your mother visited your Uncle Money in Pyongyang, she bumped into your real father in the street …’
A chill went through me. I did not like her calling this person my father.
‘… She had a photo of you in her purse and showed it to him. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at it for a long time, then he slipped it into his pocket before she could stop him, and walked away. So he has your picture.’ My grandmother’s eyes drifted to the window and the mountains. ‘After that, I wrote to his sister the actress to ask what had happened to him. She told me he had remarried soon after the divorce and had twin girls, one of whom he named Ji-hae, after you.’
Ji-hae, my birth name.
A shadow passed over my grandmother’s face. ‘He shouldn’t have done that.’
There is a superstition in North Korea that if someone remarries and gives a child of the second marriage the same name as a child from the previous marriage, the second to receive the name will die.
‘When the girl was young, she fell sick and died.’
I left my grandmother’s house in a daze. I felt hollowed out, tearful and numb at the same time. She’d said nothing about keeping this a secret, but I knew I would never mention it to my mother or my father or anyone. I was too young to know that talking about it is exactly what I should have done. Instead I buried it inside me, and it started to gnaw at my heart. I was still utterly confused. The only thing I kind of understood was that it explained the coolness of my father’s parents toward me, and their generosity toward Min-ho. He had their blood. I didn’t.
When I got home Min-ho was sitting on the floor drawing a picture with coloured crayons. What he’d drawn stunned me, and I felt tears again. And something like anger. It was crude and charming and showed stick figures of me, him, my mother and my father, all holding hands together beneath a shining sun. Inside the sun was a face of a man wearing glasses – Kim Il-sung.
Min-ho was now five years old. He was growing up into a good-natured boy, who liked to help our mother. He had a very cute smile. But now I felt as if a glass wall had gone up between us. He was a half-brother.
Our relationship changed from then on. I became an older sister who provoked him and started fights with him that he could never win. I feel so sorry about that now. My mother would say: ‘What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be more like Min-ho?’
It would be years before I could process maturely the information my grandmother had given me, and reach out to him.
At dinner that evening I said nothing. My mother chatted about some business venture of Aunt Pretty’s; Min-ho was told not to hold his chopsticks in the air; my father was calm as usual, as if nothing had changed. Eventually he said: ‘What’s up with you? You’re as quiet as a little mouse.’
I stared at my bowl. I could not look at him.
In North Korea family is everything. Bloodlines are everything. Songbun is everything. He’s not my father.
I began to push him away and withdraw from him, thinking I had lost my love for him. The pain I was feeling was making me think this.
I began to avoid him.
