by Hyeonseo Lee
Behind them, hundreds of squat houses poured yontan smoke from stovepipe chimneys, creating a low haze. Through the trees I caught a glimpse, just for a second, of my house with its tall white wall. The gate was shut. It made me wistful.
I’ll be back soon.
At the same time I was feeling a mounting elation, like bubbles rising in my chest, a sense of freedom and anticipation – that now I could do anything. In the darkness at the edge of the ice I had taken a terrible risk, but now look where I was. I had done it. I felt brave, and proud.
For a few minutes the snow everywhere seemed to blanket and silence the doubts in my head. But soon an internal self-criticism was in session. I notice that Comrade Min-young is feeling happy. I would like to remind her that she doesn’t have the first idea about what’s going to happen next.
Then I had a vision of my mother’s face, of the love and trust in her eyes as she’d said: ‘Don’t stay out late,’ and pictured her scolding Min-ho for not having told her earlier where I’d gone. My thoughts became less elated – I felt pangs of guilt, and selfishness and stupidity.
I’ll be back soon.
The road curved to the right, the trees became thicker, and Hyesan disappeared from view.
Chapter 20
Home truths
The road twisted and turned through the Changbai Mountains. We passed sparse villages of squat, tile-roofed houses along the way. They didn’t look much different from those in North Korea. But after a few hours’ distance the villages were larger and looked more prosperous. Gradually they merged into towns, and the towns into suburbs. The two-lane road became four lanes. Soon the traffic was a broad, slow-moving river of steel and glowing red taillights. We were caught in an ant-like crawl of thousands of cars, more than I had ever seen. Far from being bored, my eyes were everywhere, taking this in. Every vehicle looked new. There were none of the heavy green military trucks, the most common vehicles around Hyesan.
We stopped for lunch at a service station at the side of the freeway, which had photographs of mouthwatering dishes displayed in illuminated signs. In North Korea, there were only state-owned restaurants, which saw no reason or need to entice customers or make any effort to sell; and private, semi-legal ones operating furtively in markets or in people’s homes. But here the restaurants were advertising themselves brightly, inviting me to stop and look. I ordered egg fried rice and the waitress brought a huge plateful. Chinese people eat so much. I looked up at Mr Ahn. He laughed heartily at my expression. He was enjoying my reactions to everything.
We approached Shenyang in the late afternoon along an eight-lane expressway. Nothing had prepared me for my first sight of the city. Huge towers of steel and glass rose on either side, their tips aflame in the last light of the sun. The taxi stopped at a crossing as the lights turned red, and hundreds of people crossed the road. Every one of them was dressed differently. No one was in uniform. I glanced up and saw a soaring billboard of an underwear model.
I had not known that Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province, is one of the largest cities in China. More than 8 million people live there. It made Pyongyang look like a provincial backwater.
We reached the neighbourhood where my relatives lived, and after stopping several times to ask for directions, found the address. It was in a large, glitzy apartment complex. Each block was twenty storeys high. Mr Ahn and the taxi driver came with me in the elevator up to the eleventh floor. I rang the doorbell and felt a flutter of anxiety. I had no idea what to expect.
My Uncle Jung-gil opened the door and looked from me to Mr Ahn to the taxi driver.
‘Uncle, it’s me, Min-young.’
It took him a second to absorb this, and then his face was agog, like a cartoon character. Aunt Sang-hee joined him in the door. She was as astonished as he was.
My ‘uncle’ was in fact my father’s cousin. His family had fled Hyesan during the Korean War and he had grown up in Shenyang. He had visited us in Hyesan twice, but not for several years. He had seemed wealthy to us, a little plump, very outgoing, and always laden with gifts. He was now in his late forties.
I introduced Mr Ahn, and explained that it was my vacation and I wanted to see China before I started college. My uncle paid the enormous taxi fare and the driver left. After chatting for a while, Mr Ahn said that he was going to do some shopping and return to Changbai. We said our goodbyes.
My uncle and aunt made me feel instantly welcome. I was family – it made no difference to them that they had not seen me in years. Their apartment was modern and spacious, with small elegant spotlights set into the ceiling. This was like the homes I’d seen in the TV dramas. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave sweeping views onto a dozen tall apartment buildings identical to theirs. The sky had turned a deep orange. Lights were coming on in the other towers, making them look like jewel boxes. Beyond them, all the way to the horizon, hundreds more towers, glittering in the dusk, were being built or had been newly completed.
My uncle asked my aunt to pop out and buy some ice cream. She came back with every variety she could find.
‘Try these,’ she said. ‘Some of them are new.’
We opened them all and I took a spoonful from each. They were the most heavenly flavours I had ever tasted. Jasmine flavour, green tea, mango, black sesame, a luscious fuchsia variety called taro, and a Japanese one called red bean. Red bean. Flavours I had not imagined possible. Oh, how this made me want to stay in China.
My uncle was tall, and slimmer than I remembered him. As a girl I’d thought he looked plump because I had grown up in a country where there were no fat people, but compared with the large and rounded Chinese people I’d been seeing everywhere, I saw that his face had the boniness of someone who had endured decades of hardship. Wealth, for him, had come late in life.
I had been so caught up in describing my journey and enjoying the ice cream that we had not yet got onto the subject of family. My uncle asked after my father.
The spoon stopped halfway to my mouth. He did not know that my father, his cousin, was dead.
When I explained what had happened, my uncle’s mood darkened. ‘How dare they do that to him?’ he muttered. He pressed me for details. He wanted to know everything about my father’s arrest, the charges, the interrogation. I didn’t want to talk about this. When I’d finished he brooded in silence for several minutes, then, to my great surprise, he stood up and launched into a tirade against my country. Years of bottled resentment were suddenly on his lips.
‘You know all the history they teach you at school is a lie?’ This was his opening shot.
He started counting off the fallacies he said I’d been taught. He said that at the end of the Second World War the Japanese had not been defeated by Kim Il-sung’s military genius. They’d been driven out by the Soviet Red Army, which had installed Kim Il-sung in power. There had been no ‘Revolution’.
I had never before heard my country being criticized. I thought he’d gone crazy.
‘And they taught you the South started the Korean War, didn’t they? Well, here’s some news for you. It was the North that invaded the South, and Kim Il-sung would have lost badly to the Yankees if China hadn’t stepped in to save his arse.’
Now I knew he’d gone crazy.
‘Were you shown the little wooden cabin on Mount Paektu where Kim Jong-il was born?’ His tone was heavy with sarcasm. ‘It’s a complete myth. He wasn’t even born in Korea. He was born in Siberia, where his father was serving with the Red Army.’
He could see from my face I did not believe a word of this. He might as well have been telling me the earth was flat.
‘He’s not even a communist.’ My uncle had worked himself up into a rage. ‘He lives in palaces and beach condos, with brigades of pleasure girls. He drinks fine cognacs and eats Swiss cheeses – while his people go hungry. His only belief is in power.’
This rant was making me uncomfortable. At home we never mentioned the personal lives of the Leaders. Ever. Any such talk was �
��gossip’, and highly dangerous.
But my uncle was far from finished. He was pacing the room now. ‘Do you know how Kim Il-sung died?’ he said, pointing at me.
‘A heart attack.’
‘That’s right, and his son drove him to it.’
I looked to Aunt Sang-hee for help, but her expression was as serious as my uncle’s.
‘Kim Jong-il killed him. By the end of his life his father was a powerless old man who’d been turned into a god. Kim Jong-il was running the country. His father had no influence left except in foreign affairs.’
My uncle’s theory was this: just before Kim Il-sung died, former US president Jimmy Carter had visited him to open the way for a summit with sitting US president Bill Clinton. As his legacy to Korea Kim Il-sung was willing to make the peninsula nuclear-free, and told Carter that North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons programme. This incensed Kim Jong-il, who set about blocking the summit. The two had a blazing row. Kim Il-sung got so worked up that his heart failed.
I refused to believe this nonsense. But at the same time parts of it rang true. I’d heard rumours at school that beautiful girls were selected for the Dear Leader’s pleasure, and I’d seen for myself on the television news that he hadn’t been fasting on simple meals of rice balls during the famine as the propaganda claimed. In truth I didn’t know what to think. And so a shutter came down in my mind. My response, as a seventeen-year-old girl, was to enjoy the ice cream. What my uncle said about my country had a depressing and a repelling effect on me. I did not want to know.
Uncle Jung-gil ran a trading company. He had started off by selling pharmaceuticals to South Korea but his business had diversified and prospered. He drove a new Audi. Aunt Sang-hee was a pharmacist. They had a grown-up son who lived in another province. Both of them were talkative and extroverted, and loved dining out, dancing and socializing.
Before they took me on my first night out in Shenyang, they suggested I assumed a new name. This was for my own protection. The name they concocted for me was Chae Mi-ran. I liked it. It seemed fun to use an alias. When my uncle and aunt’s friends dropped by, I was introduced as Mi-ran. I was visiting from Yanbian, they were told, the Korean region of China where many people speak Korean as a first language and may not speak Mandarin so well. The friends gave a knowing ‘Aah’ and accepted this explanation.
Shenyang was a revelation. In North Korea, streets are dark and deserted at night. Here, the city came alive at sunset. The sidewalks of Taiyuan Street heaved with shoppers and young people my own age on a night out, boys and girls mixing together, stylish and laughing. Music boomed and throbbed from cars and bars. Everything seemed suffused with a kind of super-reality, as if I’d come from a world of black and white into one of Technicolor. It was magical – an illusion enhanced by the myriad sparkling lights in every window display, restaurant and lobby, and on the fir trees that stood everywhere. Aunt Sang-hee explained that they were Christmas trees, a Western custom that had caught on in China. Each evening we dined somewhere new. ‘What’re you in the mood for?’ my uncle would say, clapping his hands together. ‘Chinese, Korean, Japanese, European? Or something else?’ One restaurant had fish swimming in a tank illuminated an electric blue. I chose the one I wanted to eat. Menus overwhelmed me with choice. I ate ice cream every night.
Aunt Sang-hee showed me how to work the karaoke machine in the apartment. At first I sang South Korean ballads with the volume turned low and the door closed, until she yelled from the next room: ‘Turn it up, I like that one.’ In this country, there was no secret music.
After that they took me, along with a large crowd of their friends, to a noisy karaoke bar, another new experience for me. I could not believe I was singing my beloved ‘Rocky Island’ in public, and got a round of applause. I had never enjoyed a night out so much.
When, at the end of four or five days, Aunt Sang-hee said: ‘Can’t you stay a while longer?’ I took no persuading.
During the day, while my uncle and aunt were at work, I had to stay inside. But even that was fascinating. I could freely watch any television I wanted without having to close the curtains or keep the volume down or worry about the neighbours. This was pure freedom.
Before I knew it, a month had shot by and I had celebrated my eighteenth birthday in Shenyang. I could not delay my return any longer. My uncle said he would drive me back to Changbai. These weeks had been such a whirl of discovery and enjoyment that I had given little thought to the implications of turning eighteen.
The day before our departure, the home phone rang in the kitchen. My uncle answered it. His face tensed, then without a word he passed the phone to me.
Behind the crackle and hiss on the line the voice was faint. ‘Min-young, listen to me …’
It was my mother.
‘Don’t come back. We’re in trouble.’
Chapter 21
The suitor
I didn’t know how she was calling. We didn’t have a home phone. She would not have called from her workplace because the Bowibu monitored the line. Wherever she was calling from, it was dangerous. She was speaking quickly. She wasn’t angry; she had no time to tell me off, or for any chitchat.
‘The day after you left, they started a census for the next elections,’ she said.
I felt myself break out in a sweat.
Every so often the authorities registered voters in order to find out who was missing and why. I had turned eighteen and was old enough to vote in North Korea’s ‘elections’, which always returned Kim Jong-il, with a hundred per cent approval.
‘The inspectors wanted to know where you were. The banjang was with them. I said you were visiting Aunt Pretty in Hamhung. The banjang doesn’t know it’s not true, but you know how gossip gets around. There’s already a rumour that you’re in China.’
It was Chang-ho, my friend the border guard, who’d told her where I’d gone. ‘She’ll be back soon,’ he’d said cheerfully. He’d always had more looks than brains. My mother had almost fainted. For the next few days she’d been in an agony of nerves. She knew she had to do something. So a week after telling the census inspectors I’d gone to Hamhung, she reported me missing to the police.
‘The rumour that you’ve been in China may be too strong for me to take care of if you suddenly reappear. You’re young. You have your future ahead of you. I don’t want you to live your life with this stain on your record.’
What did that mean? That I could not go back at all?
Her voice was tense, urgent.
‘Our situation will be dangerous for a while. Don’t contact us. The neighbours are watching us. We’ll sell the house and move. I don’t know where, but you know what I mean.’
I understood. My mother and Min-ho would have to move to a neighbourhood where people didn’t know us and would accept the story that the family had a missing daughter.
‘I have to go,’ she said abruptly.
There was a click as she hung up. The line went dead. The call had lasted under a minute.
I handed the phone back to my uncle in a daze. I was perspiring as if I’d been for a hard run. There was something desperate about the way she’d ended the call, without even a goodbye.
When I told my uncle and aunt what she’d said they looked at each other.
‘Well, then, you should stay in China,’ my aunt said gravely. They were taken aback. They knew I had nowhere to go.
I didn’t want to be a burden, I said, but they reassured me. Things would work out, somehow. My aunt turned to stare out of the window. They were still digesting this news.
I am ashamed to admit that my first emotion, when I was alone in my room, was relief. I was just glad that I didn’t have to go back. I thought life in Shenyang was a marvellous vacation.
Over the years to come, when my loneliness would become unbearable, and the full realization of the trouble I had brought upon my mother sank in, the memory of that relief would make me so guilty that I would lie awake at night. If I’d
known that when reality began to bite, and I began to miss my mother, Min-ho, and my uncles and aunts in Hyesan so much that the feeling was almost a physical pain, I would have disobeyed her and gone straight back to Hyesan.
Now that I was to stay indefinitely in China, I had to learn Mandarin. And I had the best teacher – necessity. You can study a language for years at school, but nothing helps you succeed like need, and mine was clear, and urgent. If I didn’t want the apartment to become my prison, I had to become as fluent in Mandarin as any Chinese girl my age.
My uncle started me off with a kindergarten book that I studied alone during the day and practised in conversations with him and my aunt at night. I soon progressed to children’s stories. I watched hours of television daily. As China has so many ethnic groups for whom Mandarin is a second language, most TV dramas and news had subtitles in Chinese characters. Not only was it more interesting to learn this way, but I didn’t have to limit myself to kids’ shows because I already had a basic grasp of characters, having learned them at school. I had my father to thank for that. Back then I hadn’t seen the point of learning them, but my father had been adamant. As a result, Chinese characters became one of my best subjects.
Being free from all other distractions, I made fast progress in basic Mandarin. Recognizing a word in a subtitle that I had just learned was always a Yes! moment of satisfaction for me.
For six months I did little else apart from sneaking out for the occasional walk, and my days became monotonous. Each morning I felt more and more homesick. Eventually the day came when I stared out at the rain, seeing the other apartment towers disappear up into cloud like unfinished sketches, and it dawned on me.
I will never go home.
Over the next few days this realization took such a hold that I thought I was losing my sanity. It was a disaster, and I had not seen it coming. I’m never going to see my mother or Min-ho again.
