скачать книгу бесплатно
Chapter 9 (#ulink_592055a5-6fef-52ea-8990-707b046d1844)
To be a good communist (#ulink_592055a5-6fef-52ea-8990-707b046d1844)
I joined the other children assembling on the street. No one was ever late. We straightened our red scarves, and got into formation. The class leader, who was also our marching-group leader, held up the red banner, and we fell in step behind him, swinging our arms and singing at the tops of our voices.
Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?
Who is the patriot whose deeds shall ever last?
In September 1992 I had started secondary school in Hyesan, and marched there each morning at eight. We knew all the songs so well that we’d fall into harmony spontaneously.
So dear to our hearts is our glorious General’s name,
Our beloved Kim Il-sung of undying fame!
By now the red scarf I’d longed to wear had become an irritation to me. From my mother I was acquiring a distinct care for how I looked. I didn’t want the drab North Korean clothes. I wanted to look different. I’d also grown more conscious of my body after an incident earlier that year, in the spring.
My mother had come to my school to have lunch with me. We were sitting in the sun just outside the school building, eating rice balls on the riverbank, when a boy shouted from my classroom window on the second floor, so loud they would have heard him in China: ‘Hey, Min-young, your mother’s ugly. Not like you.’ There was laughter from other boys behind him. I was only twelve but my face was scarlet with fury. I’d never thought my mother was not pretty. I felt far more humiliated than she did. She actually laughed and told me to calm down. Then she pinched my cheek and said: ‘Boys are noticing you.’
We had classes in Korean, maths, music, art, and ‘communist ethics’ – a curious blend of North Korean nationalism and Confucian traditions that I don’t think had much to do with communism as it is understood in the West. I also began to learn Russian, Chinese characters, geography, chemistry and physics. My father was especially strict with me about learning Chinese calligraphy, which he said was important. Many words in Korean and Japanese derive from ancient Chinese, and although the languages have diverged over time, the people of these nations often find they can communicate through calligraphy. I did not see much point to this, when I had clothes and boys to think about. I did not know that a time would come when I would thank my father in prayers for making me study Chinese. It was a gift of great good fortune from him. One day it would help save my life.
Again, the most important lessons, the most deeply studied subjects, centred on the lives and thoughts of our Leaders Great and Dear. Much of the curriculum was taken up by the cult of Kim. The Kim ‘activities’ of elementary school became serious study in secondary school. The school had a ‘study room’ devoted to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-il’s mother, Kim Jong-suk. It was the most immaculate room in the school, made of the best building materials, and had been paid for with compulsory donations from parents. It was sealed shut so that dust did not settle on the photographs. We took our shoes off outside the door, and could only enter if we were wearing new white socks.
History lessons were superficial. The past was not set in stone, and was occasionally rewritten. My parents had learned at school that Admiral Yi Sun-shin, a naval commander whose tactics had defeated a massive Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century, was one of the great heroes of Korean history. By my day, his heroism had been downgraded. Admiral Yi had tried his best, we were told, but society was still backward at that time, and no figure in Korean history truly stood out until Kim Il-sung emerged as the greatest military commander in the history of humankind.
Lessons were taught with great conviction. The teacher was the only one to ask questions in class, and when she did, the student called upon to answer would stand up, hands at their sides, and shout out the answer as if addressing a regiment. We were not required to formulate any views of our own, or to discuss, or interpret ideas in any subject. Almost all of our homework was simply memorization, which I was good at, and often came top of the class.
Propaganda seeped into every subject. In our geography lesson we used a textbook that showed photographs of parched plots of land, so arid that the mud was cracked. ‘This is a normal farm in South Korea,’ the teacher said. ‘Farmers there can’t grow rice. That’s why the people suffer.’ Maths textbook questions were sometimes worded emotively. ‘In one battle of the Great Fatherland Liberation War, 3 brave uncles of the Korean People’s Army wiped out 30 American imperialist bastards. What was the ratio of the soldiers who fought?’
Everything we learned about Americans was negative. In cartoons they were snarling jackals. In the propaganda posters they were as thin as sticks with hook noses and blond hair. We were told they smelled bad. They had turned South Korea into a ‘hell on earth’ and were maintaining a puppet government there. The teachers never missed an opportunity to remind us of their villainy.
‘If you meet a Yankee bastard on the street and he offers you candy, do not take it!’ one teacher warned us, wagging a finger in the air. ‘If you do, he’ll claim North Korean children are beggars. Be on your guard if he asks you anything, even the most innocent questions.’
We all looked at each other. We had never seen an American. Few Westerners, let alone Americans, ever came to our country, but for some reason the threat of the unseen made this warning all the more chilling.
The teacher also told us to be wary of the Chinese, our allies in communism just across the river. They were envious of us, and not to be trusted. This made sense to me because many of the Chinese-made products I saw at the market were often of dubious quality. The lurid urban myths circulating in Hyesan seemed to confirm the teacher’s words. One story had it that the Chinese used human blood to dye fabrics red. This gave me nightmares. These stories affected my mother, too. When she once found insect eggs in the lining of some underwear she’d bought she wondered if they’d been put there deliberately by the Chinese manufacturer.
One day early in the first semester our teacher had an announcement to make. Training and drilling for the mass games would soon begin. Mass games, he said, were essential to our education. The training, organization and discipline needed for them would make good communists of us. He gave us an example of what he meant, quoting the words of Kim Jong-il: since every child knew that a single slip by an individual could ruin a display involving thousands of performers, every child learned to subordinate their will to that of the collective. In other words, though we were too young to know it, mass games helped to suppress individual thought.
Mass games marked the most sacred dates in the calendar. We practised all year long except during the coldest weeks. Practice was held on the school grounds, which could be especially arduous in the heat of summer, with the final rehearsals in Hyesan Stadium. The highlight of the year was Kim Il-sung’s birthday, on 15 April. I played the drums in the parade. This was followed by the gymnastics and parades for Children’s Day on 2 June, at which we’d march through the city holding tall, streaming red banners. Then we trained for the anniversary of the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War (the Korean War) on 27 July, at which we’d join with other schools to form massed choirs. Shortly after this were the mass games for Liberation Day on 15 August (which commemorated the end of Japanese rule), and Party Foundation Day, on 10 October. There was little time left over in the year for proper education or private pursuits.
I didn’t enjoy these vast events. They were nerve-wracking and stressful. But no one complained and no one was excused. My friends and I were assigned to the card section of the mass games in Hyesan Stadium, which was made up of thousands of children executing an immaculately drilled display of different coloured cards flipped and held up to form a sequence of giant images – all timed to music, gymnastics or marching. Though none of us said it, we all used to worry about the ‘single slip’ that could ruin the entire display. That filled me with terror. We practised endlessly, and to perfection. Each of us had a large pack containing all our cards, which we displayed in order. We were led by a conductor who stood at the front holding up the number of the next card. When she gave the signal, everyone held up that card in unison. The final pattern in the display formed a vast image of the Great Leader’s face with a shimmering gold wreath around it, which the children moved to give it a dazzle effect. We never got to see the visual display that we were creating, but when the stadium was full, and we heard the roar of the crowd, with tens of thousands chanting ‘Long life!’ over and over – ‘MAN–SAE! MAN–SAE! MAN–SAE!’ – the adrenalin was electrifying.
At the end of that first year at secondary school the ceremonies held on the anniversary of the Korean War affected me deeply and made me very emotional. The day began at school with outdoor speeches from our teachers and headmaster. They opened with the solemn words, spoken into a microphone: ‘On the morning of 25 June 1950, at 3 a.m., the South Korean enemy attacked our country while our people slept, and killed many innocents …’
The images conjured for us of tanks rolling across the border and slaughtering our people in their homes moved us all to floods of tears. The South Koreans had made victims of us. I burned with thoughts of vengeance and righting injustice. All the children felt the same. We talked afterwards of what we would do to a South Korean if we ever saw one.
Despite the endless and exhausting communal activities I had one private realm I could escape to: in books. Reading was a habit I’d picked up from my mother. I had picture books of fairytales, myths and folktales. I had a Korean edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, a story I loved – but it had some pages glued together by the censor, and it was impossible to peel them apart. Tales of heroes struggling against oppression were permitted as long as they fitted the North Korean revolutionary worldview, but any inconvenient details got blotted out.
By the second year of secondary school I was reading North Korean spy thrillers. Some of them were so gripping they kept me up late, by candlelight. The best one was about a North Korean special agent operating in South Korea. He lived there with his South Korean wife, never telling her his true identity. He was controlled directly by the head of secret espionage operations, a figure he’d never met face to face but with whom he’d formed a relationship over time. The story climaxes when he discovers that his controller is his own wife. The best stories had endings that were obvious all along and yet took the reader completely by surprise.
One evening at the start of my second year at secondary school, I came home to find my mother cooking a special dinner to mark my father’s first day in a new job. I had known for a while that he was leaving the air force, but I wasn’t talking to him much these days, and taking little interest in what he told me. When he arrived home, I saw him wearing a civilian suit for the first time. He looked smart, and quite different. I was so used to seeing his grey-blue uniform. He was now working for a trading company, which was controlled by the military. He was grinning broadly, and said he would be crossing into China next week on business. He showed me his new passport. I had never seen a passport before, but affected a lack of interest. My mother, however, was in high spirits. A husband with permission to travel abroad was a real mark of status. We were moving up in the world.
The only time I spoke to him over dinner, and not very respectfully, was to ask what he actually did in this fancy new job. He gave some vague, unspecific response. Clearly it was supposed to be some big secret. I rolled my eyes and left the table, which angered my mother. My father remained silent. I knew I had hurt him, but I felt more resentful towards him than ever. This was yet another fact being kept hidden from me. The pain I felt over the truth about my parentage had not lessened at all. I did not realize that in not telling me about his job he was trying to protect me.
My father began crossing into China on business, sometimes staying away for a night or two. It was very fortunate, therefore, that he happened to be at home with my mother on the evening of the fire.
About two months later, I had gone to bed very early, aching and exhausted after mass games practice, and was already asleep next to Min-ho when my mother’s cry awoke me, and my father came crashing into the room. Behind him was a flickering orange light, and everywhere a sharp reek of aviation fuel. We saved nothing from the house but the clothes we had on and the portraits my father had snatched from the wall, just seconds before the roof collapsed. All my picture books, my novels, and my beloved accordion and guitar were destroyed.
But there was something else I treasured that was also destroyed by the fire. Something so dangerous to possess that it could have got us sent to a prison camp. Looking back, the fire may have been a mighty stroke of luck.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_521178c7-f444-516e-9bf4-10df65b0b9ab)
‘Rocky island’ (#ulink_521178c7-f444-516e-9bf4-10df65b0b9ab)
A few months before the fire one of my best friends had gathered a close-knit group of us together in the schoolyard. I tended to make friends with older girls, from similar backgrounds. This friend was the daughter of the city’s chief of police. She’d heard that cassette tapes of illegal South Korean pop music could be bought, very discreetly, from certain dealers.
Soon we were in possession of some of this red-hot criminal contraband. We were among the first in North Korea to hear these new hits.
A small group of us began secretly meeting up on the weekends in the houses of one of us, and when parents and siblings were out we’d dance and sing along to the music of the South Korean singers Ju Hyun-mi and Hyun Chul, twirling around and jiving our hips, keeping the volume low. We made up our own moves. In truth we had very little idea of how people danced to pop. We knew we were not supposed to enjoy the archenemy’s music, but we did not realize quite how grave our crime was until news spread around Hyesan that some local women had been sentenced to a prison camp for partying to South Korean pop. One in their group had denounced the others.
After that I listened to the tapes alone at home, lying on my bed.
My favourite was a song called ‘Rocky Island’ by the singer Kim Weon-joong. The rocky island of the title referred to a woman he loved, and the chorus went:
Even if you don’t like me, I love you so much,
Even if I can’t wake up, I love you so much …
I adored this mush. It was about teenage love, and touched my heart in a way that filled me with longing. It was changing me, making me feel I was growing up. I got nothing like this from North Korean music. Our country had pop music of its own, but with songs called ‘Our Happiness in our General’s Embrace’ or ‘Young People, Forward!’ I cringed to listen to it.
I taught myself to play ‘Rocky Island’ on my accordion. I took care to play quietly, keeping the door and windows shut, but one morning while I was practising a hard knock sounded on the front door.
I froze.
One of our neighbours was on the doorstep. He was on his way to work. He told me he had heard me playing.
A pool of cold fear gathered in the pit of my stomach. Was he going to denounce me, or just warn me? But to my great surprise he smiled and told me that hearing that song made him emotional and gave him energy. Then he got back on his bicycle and rode off. It was such a weird thing to say. I wonder now if he knew full well it was a South Korean song and was reaching out to me, giving me a signal, like a secret handshake.
A few months later, by the time the illicit pop cassettes had gone up in flames with the house, I knew all the songs off by heart. The melody and lyrics of ‘Rocky Island’, especially, would be a great comfort to me in the times ahead.
The South Korean pop songs had given me a vague awareness of a universe beyond the borders of North Korea. If I’d had more awareness in general I might have spotted clues indicating that the world outside was undergoing dramatic changes – changes so great that the regime was being put under stresses it had never experienced before. I was oblivious to the fact that the Russians had allowed communism to collapse in the Soviet Union, ‘without even a shot fired’, as Kim Jong-il would put it. But this was affecting our country in ways that were starting to become impossible for the regime to conceal. My parents’ jobs and business dealings meant that we had enough food. I had not yet noticed that the rations of basic food essentials provided by the Public Distribution System were dwindling or becoming irregular, nor had I paid attention when the government launched a widely publicized campaign in 1992 called ‘Let us eat two meals a day’, which it said was healthier than eating three. Anyone who hadn’t yet figured out a moneymaking hustle of their own was still depending on the state for essentials, and they were beginning to suffer.
As it happened, our next move as a family took us to the very edge of that world outside, as close to it as anyone could go, as if fortune was contriving to make us look outward. Our new house faced directly onto the bank of the Yalu River itself. I could throw a stone from our front gate over the water into China.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_035209c3-0468-5c16-a542-13c57a328a40)
‘The house is cursed’ (#ulink_035209c3-0468-5c16-a542-13c57a328a40)
Our new neighbourhood was a cluster of single-storey homes separated by narrow alleys. The house was larger than previous houses we’d lived in, painted white, with a tiled roof, and surrounded by a white concrete wall. It had three rooms, each the width of the building, so that we had to go through the kitchen area to the main room and through that to the back room, which is where the four of us slept.
My mother had paid a lot of money for it. Officially, there is no private property in North Korea, and no real-estate business, but in reality people who have been allocated desirable or conveniently located housing often do sell or swap them if the price is right.
The location of this house was perfect for my mother’s illicit enterprises. She could arrange for goods to be smuggled from just a few yards away in China, straight over the river to our front door. For security against the rampant thievery she had the wall around the house built higher, to about six feet, and bought a fierce, trained dog from the military. The entrance was through a gate in the front wall, that we kept heavily locked. We had to pass through a total of three doors and five locks just to come and go. In front of the house was a path that ran along the riverside, five yards from our front gate, along which the guards patrolled in pairs. Uncle Opium and Aunt Pretty dropped by and congratulated my mother. The location couldn’t be better, they said.
Min-ho was extremely excited about this new home. It was a warm, mild autumn and the day we moved in he saw boys his own age playing in the river, mixing with Chinese boys from the other side, while their mothers washed clothes along the banks. To most North Koreans, the borders are impassable barriers. Our country is sealed shut from neighbouring countries. And yet here were five-, six- and seven-year-old boys splashing and flitting between the two banks, North Korea’s and China’s, like the fish and the birds.
The next day my mother went to introduce herself to the neighbours. What they told her made her heart sink to her stomach. She returned to the house looking angry and pale.
‘The house is cursed,’ she said, slumping to the floor and covering her face with her hands. ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake.’
A neighbour had told her that a child of the previous occupants had died in an accident. My mother thought she’d been lucky to find the place, but in fact the occupants were selling in a hurry to escape the association with tragedy and bad luck. I tried to comfort her, but she shook her head and looked tired. Her superstitions ran too deep to be reasoned with. I half-believed it myself. Many of my mother’s beliefs were rubbing off on me. I could tell she was already thinking of another expensive session with a fortune-teller to see if she could get the curse lifted.
My mother quickly furnished the house, once again doing her makeover. People who could afford them had started buying refrigerators coming from China, but my mother was reluctant to attract attention. This meant daily shopping for food, almost all of which she obtained at the local semi-official markets, not from the Public Distribution System. Her director at the government bureau where she worked had recently been sent to a prison camp after inspectors had found food in his home that he had been given as a bribe, so my mother was especially careful. We never stocked up on rice – seldom keeping more than twenty or thirty kilos in the house.
The one luxury we did buy for the new house was a Toshiba colour television, which was a signal of social status. The television would expand my horizon, and Min-ho’s, dramatically. Not for the ‘news’ it broadcast – we had one channel, Korea Central Television, which showed endlessly repeated footage of the Great Leader or the Dear Leader visiting factories, schools or farms and delivering their on-the-spot guidance on everything from nitrate fertilizers to women’s shoes. Nor for the entertainment, which consisted of old North Korean movies, Pioneers performing in musical ensembles, or vast army choruses praising the Revolution and the Party. Its attraction was that we could pick up Chinese TV stations that broadcast soap operas and glamorous commercials for luscious products. Though we could not understand Mandarin, just watching them provided a window onto an entirely different way of life. Watching foreign TV stations was highly illegal and a very serious offence. Our mother scolded us severely when she caught us. But I was naughty. I’d put blankets over the windows and watch when she was out, or sleeping.
We were now living in a sensitive area, politically. The government knew that people living along the river often succumbed to the poison of capitalism and traded smuggled goods, watched pernicious foreign television programmes, and even defected. Families living in this area were monitored much more closely than others by the Bowibu for any sign of disloyalty. A family that fell under suspicion might be watched and reported on daily by the local police. Often, subterfuge was used to catch offenders. One morning not long after we’d moved in, a pleasant and friendly man knocked on the door and told my mother that he had heard that the Yankees paid a lot of money for the returned remains of their soldiers killed during the Korean War. He had some bones himself, he said, disinterred from various sites in the province. He wondered if my mother could help him smuggle them across the border.
My mother treated requests for help with extreme caution. She knew how undercover Bowibu agents operated, dropping by with intriguing propositions. They had all kinds of tricks. We’d heard of one high-ranking family who had got into serious trouble when investigators turned up at their children’s kindergarten and asked brightly: ‘What’s the best movie you’ve seen lately?’ and a child had enthusiastically described a South Korean blockbuster, watched on illegal video. On this occasion, however, her superstitions were her best defence. She didn’t want to be haunted by the disturbed spirits of American soldiers, and told the man she couldn’t help.
In mid-November, a few weeks after we had moved to the new house, the first snow had been falling all day in fine grains that stung our faces. We were huddled on the floor for warmth, wearing our coats indoors, when my father arrived home. Each time he returned from China he brought with him small luxuries that were out of reach for most people. Sometimes he came with good-quality toilet paper, or bananas and oranges, which were almost never available at home. This time he was carrying such an enormous package that I failed to affect my usual boredom in his presence. I was too curious to know what it was. It contained gifts for Min-ho and me. Mine was a larger-than-life doll with silky white-blonde hair, blue eyes and a pale Western face. She had the most beautiful dress, of patterned gingham trimmed with lace. She was so large I could barely carry her. I had to prop her up in a corner next to my bed. My mother said she could hear me chattering to her. Min-ho’s gift was a hand-held Game Boy video game. His little face was overawed. This was something so new. We knew of no one else who had anything like it.
I can only think of that doll now with immense sadness. I was a little too old for a doll, but it was such a beautiful, generous gift. I realize now that my father felt he had lost me and was trying to reconnect with me, somehow. He knew something had gone badly wrong between us, and he had probably figured out what it was. I certainly did not deserve the gift.
It was the last thing he ever gave me.
Chapter 12 (#ulink_632e3e1e-1839-5a5c-b4ae-8c77301d8542)
Tragedy at the bridge (#ulink_632e3e1e-1839-5a5c-b4ae-8c77301d8542)
I was about to turn fourteen, by the Korean way of measuring age. It was January 1994, the beginning of an eventful and tragic year that made me grow up quickly.
I was now almost as tall as my mother. I was fit and active, playing a lot of sport, which I enjoyed very much – ice skating, becoming good enough to represent the school in a tournament, and taekwondo indoors when the weather was cold. I was a good runner, and had run the Hyesan half-marathon.
My birthday, however, got the year off to a terrible start.
I had long been pushing my luck with my appearance. The teachers had never taken much notice when I didn’t wear the school uniform – they knew they could depend on my mother when the school needed cash donations, or fuel for heating. But I was not a child any more, and my nonconformity was becoming conspicuous.
The inevitable happened.
A new teacher had joined the school a few months previously. Her name was Mrs Kang, and she taught physics. She was a young woman, with small, sharp eyes and a shrill voice. On the day of my birthday she wished us good morning, and noticed me immediately. Every girl was in school uniform and all had short hair, no longer than shoulder length. I stood out a mile in my pink Chinese coat and my perm, and a new pair of tall, fashionable boots.
Her eyes froze on the boots, and I knew I’d gone too far.
‘Why are you wearing those?’ She was addressing me in front of the whole class. ‘And for that matter, why aren’t you ever in uniform, like everyone else?’
Before I could stop myself the words were out. ‘Why do you have a problem? My mother doesn’t.’
The room tensed.
‘How dare you talk back to me!’ She was shrieking, and marching up to my desk. ‘You want to look like some rotten capitalist? Fine!’ She swung her arm out and slapped me hard across the face.
I put my hand to my cheek. The blood was singing in my ears. I was shaking, and outraged. My mother had never slapped me. I stormed out of the class, and ran home in tears.
That day, for the first time in a long time, I yearned for the comfort and security my father always provided, but he was away again, on a business trip to China. Each time he came home he seemed more and more tired and subdued. My mother said he wasn’t sleeping. Something was wrong. He’d told her he thought he was being watched.
I realize now that having the nerve to wear those boots and perm my hair was just a symptom of a deeper and general disillusion I was feeling. I was falling out of love with the ‘organizational life’ and the collective activities that no one in the country was exempt from. Now that I was fourteen I was no longer a Pioneer, and had to join the Socialist Youth League. This was another important milestone. We were told to start thinking of our futures, and of how we would serve our country. My childhood was over.
Members of the Socialist Youth League had to undergo military training. I had to put on army fatigues and learn how to shoot with live ammunition at a firing range in Hyesan. I hated this so much, and my mother was so nervous about me being surrounded by children with guns, where accidents could easily happen, and sometimes did, that she got me excused by bribing the school authorities with cash.
Ideological indoctrination intensified. As model communist youths we were now expected to deepen our emotional bond with the Great Leader, and start learning about the Party’s ideology of juche (loosely translated as ‘self-reliance’), which promoted our country’s isolation and rejection of all foreign influences.
I was now part of a Socialist Youth League ‘cell’ within my secondary school. Fortunately, I managed to avoid joining the Maintenance of Social Order Brigade – the vigilantes who monitored the streets for citizens whose ideological purity had lapsed. By 1994 there were several additions to the list of banned items. Now the youths were cracking down on anyone caught wearing clothing with Western lettering, which was in vogue in China.
By the time spring came there was no avoiding the revolutionary duty we all had to undertake: the pilgrimage to the sacred sites surrounding Mount Paektu. The mountains of Ryanggang Province were where Kim Il-sung fought as a guerrilla against the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s. To mark this significance, three of the province’s eleven counties were renamed after the great man’s wife, father and uncle. Young Pioneers and Socialist Youth from all over North Korea visited this ‘outdoor revolutionary museum’, with its statues and monuments to the Great Leader’s victories, and a nearby village called Pochonbo, where in 1937 he had led a band of 150 guerrillas in an attack on the local Japanese police station. The battle is famous in North Korean history as the great turning point in the struggle for Korean independence, and stunning proof of Kim Il-sung’s tactical genius, winning victory in the face of overwhelming odds.
Our guide showed us bullet holes on the old police station, circled in white, and a cell where the Japanese had tortured communist partisans. None of this impressed me. I just wanted to get out of there. With a tremendous effort I had to control my face to hide my boredom.
Only when I finally saw, with my own eyes, the preserved log cabin beneath the pines on the slopes of Mount Paektu, the site of the secret guerrilla base where Kim Jong-il was born, did I feel like a child again, just for a moment. I remembered painting the cabin, and the star in the sky, and the rainbow over Mount Paektu. This magical story still had the power to move me.
The disaffection I was feeling meant that my relationship with Min-ho wasn’t getting any better. He was at elementary school in Hyesan. He’d hear from the boys in his year what a cute girl their older brothers thought I was. He must have thought they were talking about someone else. I still wasn’t friends with him in the way I should have been. Deep down I wanted an older brother to protect me, not a kid I had to watch out for. He was now seven years old and developing quite an adventurous streak – I strongly suspected him of making secret forays of his own to the opposite bank of the river. He could be dogged, too. Given a chore, he’d get on with it. His school once gave the students an absurd quota of ten kilos each of berries to pick. He was the only one to hit the target. In that sense he was quite unlike me, who would find excuses to avoid physical work and not get my nice clothes dirty. The one thing we both had in common was the Hyesan stubbornness, like our mother’s.
A few days after the visit to Mount Paektu I came home from school to find my mother pacing around the house in a state of high anxiety.
‘Your father’s still not back,’ she said, folding and unfolding her arms.
My father was supposed to have returned from his business trip to China the previous day. She said he had seemed particularly anxious before leaving.
Two days went by and still he did not return.
By the third day my mother was a wreck. She could not relax, sleep, eat, or sit still. She tried several times to contact the bureau of the trading company where he worked, but each time was stonewalled and told to wait for information.
Another day passed in a dismal limbo. Min-ho was constantly asking if someone could check where our father was.
Finally, a work colleague from the trading company called at the house.
The news was not good.
My father had been arrested four days ago at the Friendship Bridge as he crossed the border back into North Korea.
