Princess Bari

by Sok-yong Hwang

  In the past, Chinese and North Koreans living along the Tumen (which they’d once regarded as nothing more than a village stream) would cross back and forth to visit each other and even exchange crops, but once the famine started in the North, the crackdowns began. The farmer we were staying with told us that if the Chinese police found us there, he and his family would be punished too, and that although they felt bad for us, we would have to go. He suggested we build a temporary shelter out of sight in the mountains, and offered to pay us with food in exchange for working in his orchard. Father went with the farmer into the mountains behind the village to find a place where we could hide; the following morning, he packed up our things and took the three of us up into the woods. He’d found some level ground on a low slope covered in underbrush where a steeply-sided ravine died out; the water flowing down the ravine had pooled next to the clearing and frozen in place.

  Father and the farmer used a pickaxe and shovel to break the frozen ground. They dug down until the sides reached over my head, just as if they were digging a hole to bury a kimchi jar, and cut branches from nearby trees to weave a conical roof, which was lashed in place to a wooden post erected at the centre of the dugout. The branches were then lined with ripped-up fertilizer sacks and covered with thickly needled pine and fir branches to keep out rain and snow. We worked together for several days to make the inside of the dugout hut more comfortable. Father created a traditional heated ondol floor for us by lining the bare dirt with wide, flat stones, leaving channels in between and covering it with scraps of vinyl scavenged from the farmer’s house. Cardboard boxes were broken down and spread on top. Grandmother, Hyun and I carved out a tiny kitchen space at the entrance to the dugout where we could cook, and stacked rocks to form a rudimentary stove big enough to set a pot or kettle on. When we lit a fire in the stove, the heat and smoke passed under the floor through the channels and escaped out a chimney at the back of the hut. Father had done such a good job with the floor that not a single whiff of smoke snuck into the room.

  So much had happened to our family that I was more than happy to sleep snuggled up next to our grandmother while our father snored away, guarding the entrance to our tiny hut with his body. Ah, a home of our own! The only part I was sad about was Chilsung. The farmer had remarked on how fond his daughter was of the dog, and offered to buy him. Father hadn’t said a word about it, though I assumed he took the money. But I figured it was better for Chilsung to be raised with love in their house than to starve with us in the mountains.

  Four

  Winter in the foothills of the Baekdu mountain range was beautiful and harsh. The slope we sheltered ourselves against was probably one among the hundreds of baby mountains that flowed down from Mount Baekdu itself. The snow fell for so many days straight that the whole world was a storm of white both night and day. We stayed cooped up in our dugout hut the whole time, like hibernating animals. Snow weighed heavily on the spruce, larch and pine trees until the branches split down the middle or snapped off of the trunks entirely; during a break in the flurries, when we stuck our heads out from behind the straw mat that served as our door, the ice coating the branches glittered radiantly in the sun. But those icy branches looked more deadly than pretty to me.

  Hyun, who was one year older but had been more like a younger sister ever since we were little, died that winter. One night a blizzard began to rage, and the wind whistled sharply.

  “Grandma, I’m so cold I can’t sleep …”

  I kept hearing Hyun’s faint voice, muffled by the blanket. Each time, Grandmother would tuck the blanket more tightly over her head and comfort her.

  “There, now. It’ll be morning soon. Then it won’t be as cold.”

  The wind whistling through the trees grew stronger and we heard a groan, like a huge wave bearing down, just before the storm crashed in on us without mercy. Our roof of woven branches flew off. Snow piled up on our blankets and threatened to bury the entire hut. Father sprang up and groped around in the dark for the tree branches and empty fertilizer bags that had served as our roof, but it had all blown away already. He began scooping up snow with his bare hands and tossing it outside, but soon gave up. The snow coming in was much greater than what he could dig out with his hands. When my blanket got so heavy that it was pressing down on my small body and making it hard to breathe, I crawled out and helped Grandmother scoop up the snow with a bowl and our cooking pot. Then I got back under the blanket, rubbed my hands together and tucked them into my armpits to warm them. My teeth chattered.

  The snow didn’t start to die down until close to dawn, and finally stopped completely when the sun rose. Our beloved hut was in a gruesome state. The storm had passed, but the wind was still strong enough to turn the snow that had accumulated on the tree branches into a fine, white powder that hung in the air. Father ran around cutting branches while Grandmother and I collected them and dragged them back to the hut. We were able to do some makeshift repairs.

  When the roof flew off again a few days later, Father despaired. He could have taken more of the vinyl sheeting the farmer would need in the spring to rebuild his greenhouses and used it to build us a roof strong enough to last for years – but he would sooner have taken us back to the farmer’s house and begged him to let us move back in. Father said generosity was like cooked rice: the longer it sat out, the faster it spoiled. In other words, if you kept imposing on people, then when you really needed their help later they would turn their backs on you. Grandmother nodded.

  That day, the three of us were so busy clearing away the snow, shaking out the blankets and rebuilding the roof that we forgot all about Hyun. Father tied branches together with plastic twine to form a frame and wove leafy branches into it, while Grandmother dug out the dry branches and twigs for kindling that had been stacked beside the entrance to the hut, shook out all of the snow and used the wood to get the fire restarted. The smell of the wood burning made me feel warmer already. When we were sitting inside the hut, our breath white in the air, Grandmother finally realized that Hyun was gone.

  “Where did little Hyun go?” she asked.

  She checked under all the blankets, and Father groped around every corner of the hut. We went outside. Father searched all around and found Hyun in a thickly wooded area filled with large trees. She was lying on her side, curled up tight like a dried anchovy. Father picked her up and Grandmother stayed by their side, shaking her head.

  “Wake up, child!” she said.

  Hyun stayed curled up as though frozen in place. We brought her into the hut, placed her under the blanket and rubbed her hands, feet and legs. She opened her eyes and stared at us as if she’d just woken from a long sleep.

  “What were you doing out there in the cold?” Grandmother asked.

  “I had to pee …”

  “You should’ve come back right away. You almost froze to death!”

  Hyun closed her eyes and didn’t respond. She looked like she was sleeping. Father kept rubbing her hands and feet.

  “Mother,” he said urgently, “she’s not warming up. Heat up some water and feed it to her.”

  Grandmother went outside, filled the cooking pot with snow and boiled it on the stove. Then she filled a small bowl with warm water and held it up to Hyun’s mouth, but Hyun only sipped enough to wet her tongue a little and went limp again. We unpacked our belongings and pulled out all the clothes – which were frozen stiff – and squeezed, rubbed and sat on them until they were filled with our body heat. Then we piled them on top of Hyun and wrapped the blanket around her. The fire had built up nicely. The cardboard that covered the floor stones was starting to warm up. But a very soft, smoke-like something hovered darkly over Hyun’s body. I didn’t know what it was, but I was afraid to get any closer or to try to make it go away.

  Hey, Big Sister, I thought to her, I know you’re trying to leave us.

  We tucked our legs under the blanket and dozed off where we sat. Sometime in the night, Hyun passed. She’d grown too we
ak, and couldn’t bear the cold. But none of us – not Father, Grandmother or I – shed a single tear. Father wrapped her small body in several layers of clothes and fertilizer sacks. As he left the hut with Hyun, he narrowed his eyes at us.

  “Don’t follow me!”

  *

  Winter passed, and bright green shoots poked up through the gaps in the lingering snow. Grandmother and I went down the mountain to pick the greens that had just begun to grow along the edges of the fields and the ridges of the paddies that had not yet been ploughed up. All we had was some salt and a little dwenjang that the farmer’s family had given us, but when we boiled the greens and seasoned them with the dwenjang or made them into a soup, the fragrant scent of the greens complemented the deep flavour of the fermented bean paste, and made for a perfect meal with a bowl of rice. And of course that was white rice we were enjoying!

  Father did some work for the farmer’s family and returned with a sack of wheat flour – not the earthy, brown flour we were used to, but a strange variety that was as white as snow. Grandmother ground up mugwort shoots and added it to the flour to make dough, and then roughly moulded the dough into small, flat gaetteok cakes and steamed them.

  One morning Father put on a thick, padded coat over his faded Mao suit, just as he used to do before heading off to work; he tightened the laces of his shoes and left home. I knew instinctively that he was heading out on a long journey. He stroked my head for a moment and then quickly pulled his hand away and coughed drily.

  “Bari,” he said, “I’ll be back in a few days. Take care of your grandmother.”

  “Where are you going?”

  He didn’t answer me, and turned to Grandmother instead.

  “Mother, it’ll take about five days. There’s plenty of food. Should last you at least two months, so don’t starve yourself. Eat as much as you want.”

  Grandmother and I stood there in silence as he left. I wanted to follow him down the mountain and all the way to the road through the orchard, but I knew he would only narrow his eyes at me and say: “Aren’t you too old for this?” So I stayed by Grandmother’s side. Father quickly disappeared amongst the trees. Grandmother must’ve seen that I was feeling down and wanted to distract me. She patted me gently on the back and whispered: “Bari, look over beneath that tree. Pheasants!”

  Indeed, a male pheasant with golden feathers, a blue band around his neck and a proud tail sticking straight up was cocking his head this way and that, while a female with a round, grey belly was foraging through the dry underbrush in search of something to eat. It never fails that once someone is out of sight, your thoughts of that person leave with them. It felt like ages had already passed since Father had spent the winter with us. Just as I now only saw my mother and two sisters who’d left for Puryong in my dreams, my father’s leaving was like a spot in the sky where a cloud had just passed.

  On nights after we’d steamed potatoes and cooked rice and finished our dinner, and owls were hooting in the woods, I would plead with Grandmother to tell me stories. Listening to her old tales made me feel like I was back in that house with the wide courtyard at the top of the hill in Chongjin. My sisters would be playing cat’s-cradle or a clapping game in the room on the other side of the house, and any moment now our mother would come out of the kitchen with a basket of gaetteok that she’d steamed in the cauldron or sulppang leavened with alcohol, and I would hear her call out merrily: “Girls, come have some snacks!” I could hear my sisters laughing in delight as they thumped across the floor.

  “Did you hear what I said, child?” Grandmother asked me.

  “No … the last thing I heard you say was that Princess Bari was the seventh daughter.”

  “That’s right. The six older daughters appear one after the other and burst into tears: ‘Our poor mother! Our poor father!’ The queen turns to them and says: ‘Alas, another girl! Your father, His Majesty the King, will collapse from anger, so go to the stonemason and ask him to carve us a stone chest. Place the baby inside of it. Then tiptoe all the way to the Dragon Swamp, slowly, slowly, and toss it in!’ But those foolish girls take off running, the heavy stone chest hoisted onto their shoulders, their backs, their heads. They keep pace by chanting, Uh-gi yung-cha! Uh-gi yung-cha! When they reach the swamp, a flute plays. It is the voice of Heaven. Sky and Earth stick together, blocking their way. They call out: ‘O Heavenly Lord! If you mean to kill us, then kill us. If you mean to strike us down, then strike us down. We’ve done nothing wrong. We are at the service of the king and are doing his bidding.’ Heaven and Earth split apart again. They toss the chest into the swamp and say: ‘Ah, now we can never again return to the palace.’ ”

  “Grandma, I thought you said she was abandoned in a forest, like me.”

  “Sometimes it’s a forest. Other times it’s a river, or the sea. Sometimes she’s saved by a crane, and other times by a magpie. Sometimes, a golden tortoise appears and saves her.”

  “And after that she’s raised by an elderly hermit couple?”

  “Well, sometimes she’s rescued by the Dragon King in his underwater palace. Then, after she’s all grown up, the king and queen become very ill, and all their subjects fall ill too. What’s to be done? A fortune teller is consulted, and they’re told that the only way they’ll be saved is if the seventh daughter they abandoned, Princess Bari, returns. A girl is brought forth from the mountains, but they’re not sure that it’s her and not some evil spirit or ghost impostor. The girl takes a few tiny steps forward and says: ‘Mother, there’s proof.’

  ‘What proof?’ the queen asks.

  ‘The blood on the door is still wet from when you pricked my ring finger as a baby and left a mark. I’ll prick my finger again, and we’ll see if the blood matches.’

  “The queen agrees, so the girl pricks her ring finger, wincing from the pain, and adds a drop to the blood on the papered door. Sure enough, it congeals together, proving it is the same blood. The queen exclaims: ‘Aigo! You’ve grown up as bright as the full moon and as strong as the king of the beasts! Was it the water? Was it the sunshine? Was it the dew? How did you grow up so well?’ ”

  “I know what happens next! She has to bring back the life-giving water to save her parents and the people of the world, right?”

  “Clever little Bari! I told you the story once, and you remembered the whole thing. So they tell her, if you go to where the sun sets over there in the western sky, all the way to the ends of the Earth, you’ll find the life-giving water. While Bari journeys through the ailing country, across the ocean and over the mountains, she is helped by gods and spirits – but she also has to wash other people’s clothes and weed their fields and do all sorts of lowly tasks. She repels ghosts and travels to Hell. She saves the sinners who are trapped there, and when she reaches the western sky there is a guardian totem pole there, a jangseung, waiting for her. Bari loses a bet with the totem pole and has to marry him and have his children and work for him for nine long years before he will give her the life-giving water. She endures all manner of hardship there at the ends of the Earth, and on her journey back she sees the boats that travel to the other world. And on the decks of those boats are souls burdened with their karma.”

  “Grandma, you left out the part about how she gets the life-giving water!”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right. Granny forgot. Bari asks the jangseung for the water, and that rat tells her: ‘You’ve had it all along. It’s the same water we use every day to cook rice and do laundry.’ ”

  “So Princess Bari did all that work for nothing?”

  “No, no. She gained the ability to recognize which water gives you eternal life.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll understand when you’re older. When she returns and sprays the life-giving water on her parents, they recover and the whole world gets better again. Ever since then, Old Grandmother Bari has lived inside of us. She’s inside me and inside you, too.”

  I heard the story of Princess Bari
many times while lying next to my grandmother in the dark. Back then I used to dream all kinds of dreams and, as I mentioned before, other than the one in which my mother and two sisters stare at me silently, none of them left much of an impression on me – except a dream I had about the Great Princess Bari. But I don’t remember for certain whether I had that dream when I was living in the dugout hut with Grandmother, or after she passed away.

  *

  There are times when I am in the middle of a dream and I think to myself, I’m dreaming right now, even as I keep following the course of the dream. When the Great Princess Bari appeared in my dream, I was strolling along a wide, empty beach. At the other end of the beach, on the white sand devoid of any tree and under the blue sky devoid of any cloud, stood a single house. It had a huge tiled roof and latticed windows and doors. The next thing I knew, I was inside. Pillars with a circumference as wide as my arms could reach around stood in a row. Sunlight slanted down into a broad corridor that looked like a palace or temple that I would later come to visit after I’d left the North for good, but stone walls blocked the light from reaching any further. It was so dark that I didn’t move from where I stood, but then the room began to brighten, as if someone had turned on a small lamp, and the faint, glimmering light spread up the walls all the way to the ridgepole at the top of the high ceiling. I took a step forward, and then another step. Someone appeared in the light. It wasn’t a golden light, rather a bright glare like the sun on a summer day, and in it hovered the white silhouette of a person. I wasn’t sure if it was her hair colour or just the light, but her hair was all white and held in an old-fashioned chignon with a long hairpin, and she wore white mourning clothes. The countless pleats in her long, loose skirt swayed as if stirred by a stray breeze. Her face was white too; I could not tell whether she was old or young, but I could sense that she was smiling gently. The figure, which floated there impassively, vanished when I took a step back and reappeared when I took a step forward. But when I stepped into the room again later, she was gone. I committed the vision to memory. I never saw her again, but that was because Chilsung and my grandmother would sometimes appear in my dreams instead to help me, even after I’d travelled to a faraway country.