The Beloved Daughter

by Alana Terry

  “If I was there,” Shin proclaimed after I told him of Father’s death, “I would have ripped out Agent Lee’s throat with my bare hands.” I was dependent on Shin for my very survival, but I remained terrified of his violent outbursts. I never forgot that it was men like Shin who destroyed my father, who defiled the Old Woman’s body, who abused me so severely in the underground detention center. I longed to believe Shin when he told me of his repentance eight months earlier, but I couldn’t forget that my freedom from Camp 22 was purchased with the lives of innocent prisoners. In this way, my savior was also my captor, enslaving me to himself by my fear of his ruthless past.

  Shin often asked me about my faith, but my answers were never enough to satisfy him. Shin wanted to experience the power, the peace, the love that he had seen in the life of the Old Woman. Alone with Shin in the middle of the Hamyong mountains, I realized that I didn’t have the spiritual bread to satiate his soul’s deep hunger.

  “Do you believe all your tales of Jesus?” Shin questioned one evening as we sat huddled by a blazing fire. A snow storm forced us to seek shelter in the opening of a small mountain cave.

  “Of course,” I declared, wondering how much snow would fall before we could resume our journey. At Shin’s insistence, I shared with him again the stories I remembered of Jesus’ life, his crucifixion, and his resurrection.

  “But what does it mean?” Shin demanded while the snow piled outside, covering the trail behind us. It was still early in the evening, but storm clouds completely concealed the sun. Our only light came from the small fire in our cave opening.

  “I suppose,” I stammered, “it means that since Jesus died, we can go to heaven and have eternal life with him there.”

  “Couldn’t God have granted mankind eternal life without crucifying his only Son?” asked Shin. “I wouldn’t give my daughter up for anything. How could any parent, even the divine, make such a sacrifice?”

  “I don’t know.” I tried to think of how my father would have responded to Shin and his incessant questions.

  “And if Jesus was God,” Shin wondered aloud, “then why wasn’t his resurrection enough to erase evil from this world entirely?” The stormy wind howled at our backs and hurled bursts of snow into our refuge. I shivered from cold and wrapped my coat tight around me.

  These were mysteries of theology that I never wrestled with. God was either a part of my life, or he wasn’t. During my times of faith, growing up in Hasambong and then living under the Old Woman’s tutelage, I simply believed what I heard. But Shin needed more than Bible stories and platitudes. He was searching for that peace that he found in the presence of the Old Woman. His soul thirsted for spiritual drink, but I didn’t know how to lead him to it. You can see at this point in my life, beloved daughter, my own spirit was still quite parched and dry.

  “The Old Woman once told me,” I began as we stared into the diminishing flames, “that God uses the evil in this world to fulfill his own purposes.”

  “But why?”

  I groped for the words that would make me sound intelligent and reasonable. “Perhaps God wanted us all to choose our own destinies, be they for good or evil.” My response seemed as weak as the fading fire.

  “But without divine intervention,” Shin countered, “every single one of us would choose the evil.”

  I wished for something to say to show Shin that I was his equal, that I could help him find the answers that he so desperately needed. “God’s wisdom is not like the wisdom of this world,” I offered, but my own words sounded so uncertain. I knew it was a dismal response to address the deep doubts that plagued Shin’s soul. “At least, that’s what the Old Woman said.” I thought about my deceased friend. How I regretted not having more time with her. “I wish she were here.”

  The dying embers reflected in Shin’s eyes. “I have never yet met a more powerful woman.” It’s hard to explain to you why my heart ached at these words.

  We were both quiet for a moment, our backs wet from the snow. Finally Shin muttered, “I wonder why God didn’t kill those guards the day she died.” Shin threw a twig into the remaining flames. “I would have.”

  I shuddered, as I often did when Shin spoke so morbidly. “Did you know the Old Woman never owned a Bible?” I asked, hoping to distract Shin from his menacing thoughts. “The last time she even saw one, she was younger than I.”

  “She didn’t need a Bible,” Shin mumbled into the smoke. “She had the truth stamped upon her heart.” I sensed another one of his black moods coming over Shin, and I wanted to pull him out of his self-focused misery.

  “Perhaps once we get to Yanji, we can find a Bible and study it together,” I offered, then grew embarrassed by the suggestion.

  “If we make it to Yanji,” Shin grumbled. For a moment, I thought about telling Shin about Moses, the man who smuggled Father’s Bible from China, but I stopped myself. Shin’s connections to the National Security Agency were too recently severed, his past too violent. I couldn’t betray the trust of another, especially one so powerful and indispensable to the underground Korean church as Moses.

  “Do you know what was most remarkable about the Old Woman?” I began again, in one last attempt to lighten Shin’s soul by my trite conversation. “She seemed to know the future. It was the Old Woman who told me that I would escape the camp.” Shin looked up for a moment, then threw another twig in the fire.

  “She was always talking about me, or listening to me talk about myself,” I remarked, remembering the sound of the Old Woman’s throaty voice. “During all those months when we were together, the Old Woman never even had the chance to tell me why the guards were so afraid of her.”

  Shin looked straight at me. Perhaps my confession was enough to jerk Shin out of his melancholy, at least for the present. “She didn’t?” My words weren’t quite true; the Old Woman had plenty of opportunities to tell me of her enigmatic past, but she chose not to for some unknown reason.

  “For over a year I’ve felt like I’ve been left out of a great mystery,” I admitted.

  “It truly is a mystery,” Shin agreed. I was thankful for his renewed interest in our conversation. Shin shifted his weight and swept some snow off his shoulders. “The Old Woman’s son was killed by the guards.”

  “She told me about that.”

  “Yes, but did she tell you what happened in the camp on the day of his execution?”

  “She said that her son began preaching to the crowds, urging them to convert.”

  “That was before they shot him,” Shin stated. “Within minutes of his death, while he was still bound to the execution pole, the sky covered over with clouds. They say the day was completely clear, but in a matter of minutes it was pouring down rain.” If the Old Woman’s son were killed in the summer, there would be very little unusual about a sudden rain storm. I waited for Shin to continue.

  “That very hour, lightning struck the administration building and nearly burned it to the ground.” As I listened to Shin, I was mesmerized by the growing firelight reflected in his dark eyes. “The guards were afraid, thinking it must be some kind of an omen. Then they forgot about the storm and the fire. Until the following summer.”

  “What happened then?”

  “The Old Woman was in the detainment center,” Shin recounted, “but she refused to stop talking about her Jesus. So eventually the guards decided to kill her. They didn’t want her to start proselytizing like her son had at his execution, so they took her secretly to a gallows that used to stand by the officers’ quarters.

  “Guards at the camp are always trying to come up with unusual ways to execute prisoners,” Shin stated. I felt myself again withdraw in fear from Shin and his brutal past. “They say that the Old Woman was placed in the noose and made to stand on her toes until she eventually collapsed and hanged herself. She stood there for two and a half days,” Shin proclaimed, his eyes wide. “She never wavered, never fell asleep. Knowing her, she was probably singing hymns the entire time.” I
grinned when I remembered the Old Woman’s love for sacred music.

  “One officer told me they took bets to guess when the Old Woman would die. No one expected her to survive a third night, so several guards stood watch, for recreation more than anything else.” I wondered how anyone could speak of an execution so casually.

  “There was another fierce rain storm that night,” Shin went on. “Then, just like her son did, the Old Woman started preaching to those guards gathered around to witness her death. She proclaimed the name of Jesus well into the night, but eventually her voice grew too tired to continue. The guards could see that she was beyond the point of human exhaustion. She was soaked by rain and hadn’t slept in nearly three days.

  “The Old Woman’s eyes finally started to close. Everybody there was certain she was about to collapse and hang herself, when a bolt of lightning struck the noose and broke it. The Old Woman fell to the ground, and when one of the guards finally worked up the courage to check on her, she was quite alive.”

  In spite of everything I knew about my friend, it was hard to believe that such a peculiar set of events really happened.

  “From that time on,” Shin added, “the Old Woman was placed in solitary confinement. The guards were instructed not to harm her in any way. People were afraid that her death would bring great judgment upon the entire camp.” I thought back to the fearful looks of the officers the morning the Old Woman grew ill, and the offerings of appeasement laid at the door to our cell after she died.

  “What’s even stranger,” Shin concluded, “is that when the guards went back to look at her records, they found out that lightning delivered the Old Woman from death on the exact anniversary of her son’s execution.”

  I didn’t bother to ask Shin how much, if any, of the Old Woman’s story was embellished over the decades as it was passed down from one officer to another. I was thankful for his conversation, thankful that I managed once again to keep Shin from succumbing to the dark depression that I feared might one day consume him entirely.

  We talked about the Old Woman for a little while longer and then stretched out on the floor of the cave. My heart was heavier than usual as I thought about my former cellmate. When I knew her, the Old Woman’s life was surrounded by such secrecy. Now that I knew all of her tale – however miraculous – that mystery was stolen away from me forever.

  I wrapped my coat around my chest and tried to fall asleep. Instead I lay still listening to the howling wind as it whipped through the entrance of our small mountain cave.

  Unmerited

  “For it is by grace we have been saved.” Ephesians 2:8

  Three weeks after the fire in the train depot, Shin and I arrived in Hasambong. The harsh weather and my poor physical condition had kept us from crossing the mountains as quickly as Shin planned. We ran out of food after reaching the mountain peak and subsisted on bark and whatever roots we could dig out of the snow.

  I wish I could explain to you, beloved daughter, exactly how I felt when my hometown came into view. Nine years had passed since the inspection unit stole my parents and me away from Hasambong. I was only a child then. In those nine years away from home I suffered unspeakably, but I survived.

  We were too conspicuous to pass through Hasambong directly, and so we sat on a small hillside overlooking my hometown. We waited for nightfall, hidden in a thick forest of the pine and fir trees that stood out so starkly in memories from my childhood.

  “My old grade school is over there,” I told Shin, pointing to the weather-worn building near the Tumen River. “And there’s the precinct building.” Nine years ago, as I was dragged away to prison camp, I never expected to see that place again. “That’s where my father was shot.”

  “I’ve been wondering,” Shin commented as I stared at so many familiar landmarks, “what was it your father said the night he was arrested that made the guards so furious?”

  I thought about that night at the precinct building often, but my memories weren’t of the words uttered but of the terror I felt before wickedness and evil triumphed once and for all. I stared at the precinct building, trying to remember what Father said so many years ago. “He was bold. He was willing to risk his own life, and even mine, for his Savior.”

  “Why?” Shin pressed. How could I explain to Shin what I didn’t fully grasp?

  I tried to imagine how Father would answer Shin’s question. “Well,” I started, “Father loved God even more than he loved his own life.”

  “But to put his child at risk!” Shin exclaimed. I was certain Shin was thinking of his daughter on the other side of the border. “How could a loving father do something like that?”

  In my past I despised Father for what he put me through, but I wasn’t willing to listen to Shin voice such doubts himself. “My father loved me more than you could ever imagine.”

  Shin opened his mouth but then closed it again. I stared at the precinct building in silence. “I still don’t understand,” Shin confessed after a few minutes. “Surely God wouldn’t punish your father for trying to save you. Would he?”

  I bit my lip, wishing Shin would ask me about something else, anything else about my hometown. “Father’s faith didn’t really work that way,” I told him. “I don’t think he worried much about God punishing him.” Shin leaned toward me. “Father loved Jesus. He obeyed God because his heart overflowed with thankfulness, not because he was trying to escape punishment or win the Lord’s approval.”

  Shin rubbed his hands together. “He didn’t try to earn God’s favor?” I shook my head. Shin leapt up and began to pace in the snow.

  “Because no mortal could ever earn the favor of the Almighty,” Shin went on. I was shocked when Shin’s eyes met mine; for the first time since I met him, Shin’s face was shining with joy. “It’s not about what we can do for God. We can’t do anything good on our own.” Shin spoke rapidly now as he voiced his thoughts out loud. “It’s not a matter of just trying harder. It’s a matter of love and simple trust.” I longed to be caught up in Shin’s newfound discovery, but instead I was baffled. Shin may as well have been speaking to me in the language of the Chinese patrol guards whose watchtowers stood fixed across the frozen Tumen River.

  Shin grabbed my hand. I wondered how a simple philosophy could bring Shin so much happiness. “That’s what the good news is,” Shin proclaimed. “It means that we can never offer God a life of true obedience. Instead it’s his power and love that make us acceptable to him.”

  I was glad for Shin’s apparent epiphany, but my mind was still stuck in the precinct building nine years ago, my ears still ringing with the echoes of gunfire.

  The Crossing

  “Whoever hears my words and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.” John 5:24

  Shin and I lay down to rest in the dense forest overlooking Hasambong. I don’t think I’ve ever missed my father as much as I did that night underneath the starry sky. Even sleep didn’t ease the hollow ache in my heart.

  Shin shook me awake in the middle of the night.

  “It’s time,” he announced to the starlit stillness. We had already decided that tonight was the night we would sneak across the Tumen border into China.

  I rushed with Shin toward the frozen river, praying that the border patrolmen wouldn’t see us. We arrived at the bank of the Tumen a little while later, panting hard and sweating in spite of the cold.

  “Only think,” I whispered, hoping my forced confidence might bring us good luck, “you’ll see your daughter soon.”

  Shin stared off into the distance. “Before we go, I need to tell you something.” He turned to stare at me with fierce intensity. I flushed in spite of the cold night air and for some reason wondered if he was about to kiss me. A dog howled in the distance, jerking Shin into action. His thoughts still unspoken, Shin held my elbow, and we ran as fast as we dared on top of the ice and snow, crouching in the starlight. As soon as we started moving, I reg
retted not waiting for a cloudy night. With all of my senses heightened, the air was animated with noises: a twig breaking, Shin breathing heavily by my side. When we reached the middle of the river, the ice groaned loudly.

  “It’s about to crack!” My body tensed and refused to move.

  Shin grabbed my arm. “That ice is at least half a meter thick,” he assured me. “You’re as safe as you were on the shore. Now, hurry.” If Shin weren’t by my side, I would never have found the courage to continue across the frozen river. As it was, Shin pulled me along so that even if I wanted to turn back, I wouldn’t have been able to break free from his hold.

  Shin and I made it to the opposite bank and fell in the snow. We paused by a small grove of bushes. I was no longer on Korean soil. Any sense of joy or exhilaration at our successful river crossing, however, was quickly dispelled when I heard a dog snarling. When I was a girl, I watched the Chinese guards patrolling the border with their wolf-like canines. I never imagined having to confront one of those beasts face to face.

  Shin put his finger to his lip, and with his other hand he grabbed my elbow. We listened again; the canine’s warning growls were coming closer. Immediately Shin stood up and pulled me, half running, half tripping, up the riverbank.

  In an instant, white lights from a watchtower illuminated the night sky. “Faster!” Shin called out. My lungs were bursting with exertion and fear. I begged God to protect us. A rock jutting out from a snow pile caught my boot. I screamed as I fell to the ground. My face slammed into the snow.

  Shin was already several paces ahead, but he turned back and ran toward me. “Get up!” he shouted as another round of machine-gun fire sounded from the opposite direction. Shin gasped and fell on top of me. I tried to push him off, but he wouldn’t move.

  “Stand up!” I begged. I reached to wipe some melted snow off my face. It was hot. And it wasn’t snow.

  Was I shot? I explored my bloody face with my fingers. The blood wasn’t mine. It was Shin’s. I felt my friend’s neck for a pulse.