Princess Bari

by Sok-yong Hwang

  Hwang Sok-yong

  PRINCESS BARI

  Translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

  www.periscopebooks.co.uk

  Princess Bari

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  Periscope

  An imprint of Garnet Publishing Limited

  8 Southern Court, South Street

  Reading RG1 4QS

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  Copyright © Hwang Sok-yong, 2015

  The right of Hwang Sok-yong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  This English translation copyright © Sora Kim-Russell, 2015

  The translation of this book was supported by the Daesan Foundation.

  ISBN 9781859641767

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book has been typeset using Periscope UK, a font created specially for this imprint.

  Typeset by Samantha Barden

  Jacket design by James Nunn: www.jamesnunn.co.uk

  Printed and bound in Lebanon by International Press:

  interpress@int-press.com

  Many small stars fill the blue sky, and many worries fill our lives.

  Jindo Arirang [Korean folk anthem, variation from the Jindo region in South Korea]

  One

  I was barely twelve when my family was split apart.

  I grew up in Chongjin. We lived in a house at the top of a steep hill overlooking the sea. In the spring, clusters of azalea blossoms would poke out from among the dry weeds, elbowing each other for space in the vacant lots, and flare a deeper red in the glow of the morning and evening sun as Mount Gwanmo, still capped with snow and cloaked in clouds from the waist down, floated against the wide eastern sky. From the top of the hill, I watched the lumbering steel ships anchored in the water and the tiny fishing boats sluggishly making their way around them, the rattle of their engines just reaching my ears. Seagulls shattered the sunlight’s reflection on the surface of the water, which glittered like fish scales, before wheeling off into the sun itself. I used to wait there for my father to come home from his job at the harbour office or for my mother to come back from market. I would leave the road, scramble up a steep slope and squat at the edge of the cliff, because it was a good spot to watch out for them, but also I just liked looking down at the sea.

  We had a full house: Grandmother, Father, Mother, my six older sisters. Most of us had been born within a year or two of each other, which meant our mother was pregnant or nursing for practically fifteen years straight. The moment one girl popped out, she was waddling around with the next. My two oldest sisters never forgot the fear that filled our house each time our mother went into labour.

  Luckily, Grandmother was by her side each time, acting as midwife. They told me our father used to pace back and forth and chain-smoke outside the door or out in the courtyard, but after the third girl was born, whenever our mother showed signs of going into labour, he stayed late at work instead and even volunteered for the night shift. The anger he’d been suppressing finally exploded when Sook, the fifth girl, was born. That morning, Mother and Grandmother were in the main room off the kitchen, bathing newborn Sook in a tub of warm water, when Father returned home from night duty. He opened the door, took one look inside, and said: “What’re we supposed to do with another of those?” He yanked little Sook from their arms and shoved her head under the water. Shocked, our grandmother hurriedly fished the baby from the tub. Sook didn’t cry, but just spluttered and coughed instead as if she’d swallowed too much water and couldn’t breathe. When the sixth girl, Hyun, was born, Jin, the oldest, wound up with a brass bowl of kimchi on her head as she was coming back from the outhouse just as our father vented his anger by tossing the breakfast tray into the courtyard.

  So what do you figure happened when I was born? Jin told me: “We all crowded into the corner of the kids’ room and shivered in fear.” After they heard the newborn’s first cry, Sun, my second-oldest sister, crept out to investigate, only to return pouting and crying.

  “We’re doomed! It’s another girl.”

  Jin warned everyone: “Not a peep out of any of you, and don’t even think about stepping foot out of this room until Father gets home.”

  Grandmother, who caught me when I was born, wrapped me in a blanket, my skin still covered in blood and fluid, and then sat vacant-eyed on the dirt floor of the kitchen, too much at a loss to even think of boiling up a pot of seaweed soup for our mother. Mother cried quietly to herself; then, after a little while, she picked me up and carried me out of the house to a patch of woods a long way from our neighbourhood where no one ever went. There she tossed me into some dry underbrush among the pine trees, and covered my face with the blanket. She probably meant for me to smother to death, or to freeze in the cold morning wind.

  When Father got home, he opened the door without a word. Of course, he could tell from the mood in the house – Mother had the blanket up over her face and was unresponsive, and Grandmother just coughed drily now and then from her spot in the kitchen – that he had no hope of ever getting a son, and he turned heel and left. Mother and Grandmother each stayed put in their stupors, one inside and one out in the kitchen, until the sun was high in the sky. Finally, Grandmother went back inside.

  “What happened to the baby?”

  “Don’t know. Must’ve crawled away on its own.”

  “Why, you threw it out! You’ll be struck dead by lightning for this, you stupid girl!”

  Grandmother searched the house inside and out, but I was nowhere to be found. Fearful of how Heaven might curse them, and filled with pity for her daughter-in-law and poor little granddaughters, she filled a porcelain bowl with cold water, placed it on a small, legged tray and sat out back, rubbing her palms together in prayer.

  “Gods on Earth, gods in Heaven, I pray to you, lift the bad fortune from this home, bring that baby back in one piece, turn the poor mother’s heart, calm the father’s anger and keep us all safe.”

  Grandmother finished praying and searched the house again and all over the courtyard and the surrounding neighbourhood, before finally giving up and returning home. She sat despairingly on the twenmaru, the narrow wooden porch that lined the house, when our dog Hindungi suddenly poked her head out of the doghouse and stared up at her. As Grandmother turned to look at the dog, her eye caught a tiny corner of the blanket she’d wrapped me in. Hoping against hope, she dashed over to the doghouse and peeked inside: Hindungi was lying down, and there I was, bundled up and nestled between her paws. Grandmother said my eyes were closed, and I was snuffling in my sleep. Hindungi must have followed our mother when she left the house to get rid of me, slinking behind at a careful distance, and then caught my scent and hunted through the underbrush before picking me up in her jaws and carrying me home.

  “Aigo, our Hindungi is such a good dog! This child was sent to us from Heaven, I’m sure of it!”

  Maybe that’s why I felt closest to my grandmother and our dog when I was little. Hindungi was named for the white fur that her breed, Pungsan, was known for, but I myself didn’t have a name until my hundredth day, when babies are said to be fully among
the living and I was sure to survive infancy. It hadn’t occurred to anyone to give me one. Later, after our family was dispersed in all directions and my grandmother and I were living in that dugout hut on the other side of the Tumen River, she told me a story she’d heard long, long ago from her great-grandmother. It was the story of Princess Bari, whose name meant “Abandoned”. She would always finish the story by singing the last lines to me:

  “ ‘Throw her out, the little throwaway. Cast her out, the little castaway.’ So that’s how you got the name ‘Bari’.”

  In any case, for a long time I didn’t have a name. Grandmother brought it up while we were eating one day. We were sitting at the round tray with Mother, after Father and Grandmother were served their food at the square tray.

  “I mean, really!” Grandmother confronted Father out of the blue. “Why doesn’t that baby have a name yet?”

  Father slowly ran his eyes over the children clustered around the table, as if counting us one by one.

  “Well,” he said, “I know there are enough girl names for twins, all the way up to sextuplets … but what am I supposed to do after that? I only know so many characters.”

  “You mean to say you went to college and can speak Chinese and Russian, but you can’t come up with a name for your baby girl?”

  This was back when the Republic was still generous, so whenever twins were born, regardless of whether they were in a big city or a remote country village, reporters would show up from the TV stations and newspapers and the babies would appear on the evening news. Thanks to the country’s strong welfare system, babies were cared for in state nurseries and mothers received ample rations of powdered formula, and the Great Leader himself would thank the parents and shower them with gifts, from baby clothes to toys. Quadruplet girls were named after the four noble plants of classical Chinese art – Orchid, Bamboo, Chrysanthemum and Plum Blossom – and there were probably similar matching names for quintuplets and sextuplets. That’s what our father meant when he said he had only been prepared for six girls. My sisters’ names – Jin, Sun, Mi (Truth, Goodness and Beauty) and Jung, Sook, Hyun (Grace, Virtue and Wisdom) – came in sets of three, and no more. Our father probably thought that my being born a girl had turned those complete and perfectly matched names into a meaningless jumble of letters. He had nothing more to say about it. But since the subject had been raised, Grandmother and Mother kept talking after he left for work.

  “Little Mother, maybe it’s time we gave it a name,” Grandmother said.

  “Name her ‘Sorry’ or ‘Letdown’, because that’s how I feel. Sorry and let down.”

  “I have heard of names like that before, but let’s see. You tried to abandon her in the woods …”

  And that’s how my grandmother came up with my name. Of course, it wasn’t until much later, after I’d gone to the ends of the Earth and suffered every kind of hardship, that I understood exactly why she named me “Bari”.

  *

  Our father was raised by his widowed mother. Grandfather died in a war that started long before I was born. Grandmother claims he was a war hero, and that his story had even made its way onto one of the central radio station’s broadcasts. In some faraway seaside town way down in the south, Grandfather had fought off a troop of Big Noses, and singlehandedly at that, as they were rolling in on their tanks. Grandmother would often retell the story after dinner when the trays had been put away, or on summer nights when we would spread out straw mats in the front courtyard and gaze up at the stars. But one night Father got so fed up with hearing it that he butted in, and the heroic tale of my grandfather lost its shine.

  “Enough already! Stop it with your stories. That’s all straight out of a Soviet film.”

  “What film?”

  “That film we saw in town. Don’t you remember? The neighbourhood unit went to see it as a group. You’re mixing it up with Father’s story.”

  The plot of the film went like this: a young soldier, still wet behind the ears, falls asleep while standing guard beneath a collapsed building in a shelled-out city. At dusk, his unit retreats, leaving him behind and still fast asleep. Meanwhile, enemy troops roll right in under the assumption that the ruined city has been evacuated. The soldier is startled awake by the noise. He sees tanks, the headlights of army vehicles and the shadowy figures of enemy soldiers coming down the main strip. Terrified, he aims his submachine gun, pauses in absolute bewilderment and pulls the trigger. The tanks stop, and for a moment all is silent. The soldiers halt in unison, then turn and retreat: they believe their enemy is waiting to ambush them in the dark. Only then does the soldier crawl out from the rubble and take off running. He runs all night, and manages to catch up to his unit around daybreak. He’s called before the platoon leader, then the company commander and finally the general, who praise him each in turn and later bestow him with a medal. He’s named a hero for singlehandedly stopping an enemy division, and is rewarded with a special furlough.

  Anyway, from what our father told us, it was probably true that Grandfather had been killed in combat on the eastern front. He said Grandmother was called before the People’s Committee and given official notification of his death along with some extra rations in recognition of his services, and when Father went to school, his homeroom teacher had him stand at the podium while she made the students offer up a moment of silence. But Grandmother had already known exactly when Grandfather had died, and had fixed the date for the anniversary of his death so the family would know when to observe memorial rites every year. As always, she had seen what was coming in her dreams.

  Late one night, Grandmother heard Grandfather’s familiar cough outside and opened the door. A ray of moonlight shone down on the courtyard, and in it stood Grandfather in a torn military uniform. She asked him where he’d been, and he said he’d walked up the east coast, through the towns of Mukho, Gangneung, Sokcho, over twenty mountains, maybe more, to get to her. He was carrying a bundle of some sort under his arm, so she told him to set it on the twenmaru and come on in, that she would make breakfast for him in the morning; but he said he had a long way to go still, and he kept his shoes on and remained standing. Grandmother quickly took his bundle and set it down, but when she turned back, he had vanished. The courtyard was empty. She awoke with a start and put her hand out. There was something on the floor next to the bedding. When she turned on the lamp to examine it, the wardrobe doors were hanging open and some clothes had spilled out: Grandfather’s padded pants and jacket and the rabbit fur-lined vest he had taken off and stashed in the closet before leaving for the army. That night she hastily scrounged together a bottle of alcohol, dried pollock and some fruit for his memorial table to give him a simple sending off, and burned his clothes to send him on his way.

  Grandmother saw ghosts sometimes, and could even hear the nonsensical conversations they had. Ever since our father was young, she would set out a bowl of clean, freshly drawn well water behind the house and pray before it to the gods, but after such things were outlawed by the Republic, she stopped doing it outside and would squat on the dirt floor of the kitchen and pray there instead. Mother and Father tried to stop her at first, and the two of them would get into fights about it.

  “Aren’t you supposed to stop her when she starts up with that black magic?”

  “Aigo! Do you really think your mother’s going to listen to me? She scares me with all that ghost talk. I don’t dare say a word about it. Besides … doesn’t it run in your family?”

  “What do you mean, ‘runs in my family’?”

  “Well, she said your great-great-grandmother was a shaman in Hamheung.”

  “Watch your mouth! Don’t you know what kind of trouble we could get in if you start spreading that nonsense around?”

  “But when I married you, everyone in your village knew that your great-grandmother and your great-great-grandmother were powerful shamans before Liberation …”

  “Damn it, woman! Keep it down! We’re descended from poor farmers.
That means we’re part of the core class.”

  Grandmother said that Father had been a good student ever since his days at the People’s Primary School. Right after the war, when the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army was still stationed in the city, he had picked up some Chinese here and there and would even go to the base with the older folk to help settle civil complaints. He graduated first in his class from secondary school and even received a recommendation to attend university in Pyongyang.

  Our parents wound up married to each other due to our grandmother’s meddling. Father had completed his labour mobilization during summer break from his first year of university, and found a spare week to return home for a visit only to discover a girl waiting there for him.

  He stepped through the gate and called out: “Mother, can you bring me some cold water?” Who should come out of the kitchen then but this short, bob-haired girl carrying a bowl of water with both hands …

  He forgot all about the water and stared at her stupidly before finally asking: “Who’re you, Comrade?”

  Grandmother answered for her.

  “Who do you think? That’s your wife.”

  Father practically jumped out of his skin at that and ran for the station, where he hopped the first train for Pyongyang. About a month later, he was ordered to report to the academic affairs office. The professor in charge of monitoring the students stood with his cheeks puffed out and studied him for a moment before gesturing with his chin for him to sit down.

  “I didn’t think you were the type, Comrade – only a student, but already you’re married … Now, I know your mother’s a widow and girls run in your family, so I understand why you want to get started as soon as possible and try for a son. But explain to me why you abandoned your wife.”

  Father, flabbergasted, started talking gibberish.

  “No, uh, it’s not like that, you see, I went home for a short visit and out of the blue my mother said I was married so I hurried back to school and –”