by Hyeonseo Lee
One evening in my second year in Shanghai I arrived at the Pyongyang Okryugwan to find it closed. The next morning the gossip was all over my office – a waitress had run off with one of my company’s South Korean clients, a friend of my boss the director. Rather unwisely, the man had hidden the woman in his apartment. The North Koreans reported the disappearance to the Shanghai police, who questioned the staff, quickly identified the customer, and went straight to the man’s apartment. Both were deported, he to South Korea and she to North Korea and her fate. I never found out for sure who the waitress was, but I had an awful intimation it was the friendly one who’d wanted a boob job. Two months later the restaurant reopened with completely new staff.
By my second year in Shanghai I sometimes forgot that I was North Korean. My friends were all Korean-Chinese or South Koreans from my workplace. I socialized with them as one of them. I spoke fluent Mandarin with a Korean-Chinese accent. My ID documents stated that I was Korean-Chinese. I was enjoying my work and felt that I was finally on life’s upward curve. No one in the city knew my true identity.
I was jolted out of this insouciance by an unexpected encounter.
It was during my lunch hour on a busy street in Koreatown. A loud, man’s voice behind me said: ‘Soon-hyang?’
I froze. But then I could not stop myself from turning around to see who it was. I recognized him at once, the friendly businessman from the restaurant in Shenyang who’d put me in touch with the Chinese broker, someone who probably knew full well I was from North Korea. He was smiling, waiting for me to acknowledge him.
‘You’ve mistaken me for someone else,’ I said and walked away.
Fear breathed on me like a draught of night air. I took this as a warning not to get complacent. I was not so safe from my past. It could catch up with me at any time. For days after that I avoided Koreatown at lunchtime.
Just a few weeks later, I was recognized again, in a much more serious incident.
It was at a house party I was taken to by a colleague from work. She told me it was the birthday celebration of a charming man from Shenyang whom she knew only vaguely. When we arrived at this man’s apartment, the music was booming and the drinks flowing. I was led across a crowded room to meet the host. When I saw him I blanched. I knew him. He owned a restaurant in Shenyang. I’d met him several times and had even been on nights out with him and others. I racked my brains for an excuse to turn and leave. But it was too late. He’d seen me.
‘Soon-hyang,’ he said. His eyes were wide with astonishment. ‘I don’t believe it.’ He was genuinely happy to see me. ‘What are you doing here?’
My work colleague gave me a puzzled look.
‘Soon-hyang? No,’ I said, laughing. ‘That’s not me, but it’s lovely to meet you.’
He thought I was pulling his leg. It took me several minutes to persuade him that I was not this person Soon-hyang. My work colleague was listening to all of this. If anyone at my workplace realized I was not who I said I was, questions would be asked, and my documents examined.
Eventually he scratched his head and said over the noise: ‘Well, I have to tell you that I know a girl in Shenyang who looks exactly like you. You must have a twin. I’m sure this is a secret only your mother knows.’
I had just about got away with it, when a fresh group of guests arrived.
‘Soon-hyang!’
A woman was waving at me from across the room, and pushing her way through toward me.
It was a strange feeling, being exposed so publicly. A kind of exhilaration mixed with a sickening contraction in my stomach.
‘Soon-hyang! I don’t believe it, it’s been a long time.’ She hugged me, right in front of the man I’d just lied to. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
She was another acquaintance from the restaurant trade in Shenyang, a woman I’d met many times. There was no possible way I could repeat the lie to someone who so obviously knew who I was. Over her shoulder my eyes searched for my work colleague. She was caught up in a conversation with someone and had not heard this drama over the noise of the party. But the man from Shenyang, whose party this was, was staring at me in bewilderment. His eyes were saying, Why would you tell a lie like that?
I had to say something to him.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said with my head lowered. ‘Please don’t tell anyone.’
I wished I could tell him why I had lied about my name, but I couldn’t. I went home filled with self-loathing. Wherever I go, even in a country as big as this, the truth will catch up with me. All I could do was stay one step ahead of it by lying and deceiving. In bed that night I cried for the first time in a long time. What I missed most was a North Korean friend I could confide in and trust, someone who would understand why I’d behaved in the way I had; who would tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that she would have done the same.
As if in answer to a prayer, fortune sent me one.
Her name was Ok-hee, and I’d known her briefly back in Shenyang. She too had been a waitress, and belonged to the small circle of North Korean friends I had started making. I had barely got to know her when the police interrogated me. After that I had kept a low profile and shunned everyone, especially North Koreans.
It was actually me who saw her first, outside a cosmetics store in Koreatown. She was extremely surprised to see me. She was a slim quiet girl, with a charming habit of inclining her head and twirling her hair when spoken to. Over a cup of bubble-milk tea she admitted to me that her ID was a fake. Her greatest fear was that her poor Mandarin would let her down and expose her. She too was fleeing the authorities in Shenyang.
Ok-hee would become a great friend to me in China.
Chapter 32
A connection to Hyesan
Not long after meeting Ok-hee, I got a call out of the blue from Min-ho. What he told me transformed my life.
I was doubly surprised to hear him, not only because I’d been losing hope of ever speaking to my family again, but because I’d always thought that I would be the one making contact. It hadn’t occurred to me that this might be in his power, too. He was speaking from Mr Ahn’s house in Changbai.
After my initial elation, my spirits began to slide when he explained the reason for the call. He and my mother had money problems, he said. The cash I had given him in Changbai had been used up.
‘Used up?’ I was dumbfounded.
‘Yes. Will you send some more?’
I had given them 5,000 yuan. A farmer in China makes 2,000–3,000 yuan a year. I figured the money would last them quite a while, even if they didn’t earn anything themselves. After years in the Chinese workforce, I had developed an emotional attachment to money. My earnings were my hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred. North Koreans have no way to relate to this. In the outside world, they believe, money is plentifully available to all. Min-ho seemed to think I just had to go to a money shop and get more. There was no point telling him that I had just paid a great deal for my ID, that my rent was high, and that I had a huge debt to repay after the disaster with the gang.
I sighed, and said: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
He was vague about where the money had gone. I guessed that my mother must have had bribes to pay. It was only later that I found out that she had been helping my uncles and aunts.
At the end of the conversation, almost as an afterthought, he dropped another bombshell. This piece of information changed everything for me.
‘Oh, and could you send me a cellphone?’
He said that people in the border area had started using cellphones to make calls to China, using the Chinese network. It was highly illegal, of course.
This took a moment to sink in.
The next day I bought a Nokia and a chip and sent it, along with 1,000 yuan in cash, for Mr Ahn to send to Min-ho.
The first time I called the Nokia, Min-ho answered. Something like this only happened in a happy dream. He’s passing the phone to my mother.
‘Min-yo
ung?’ I hadn’t been called that name in a long time. ‘Is that you?’
I was hearing her voice, but it sounded strange and ethereal, as if she were speaking from another world.
‘Omma,’ I said, using the Korean word for mother.
‘Yes?’
‘Is it you?’
Just as with Min-ho when I heard his voice on the phone, the suspicion flitted across my mind that this wasn’t her, that it was some kind of trap. ‘Can you tell me what time of day it was when you last saw me?’
She laughed, and the laugh was warmly familiar.
‘You left the house just after dinner, at seven o’clock on the fourteenth of December 1997. And you had those bloody fashion shoes on.’
Now I laughed. ‘How do you remember so exactly?’
‘How could I forget the night my little girl left me?’
She remembers the exact date and time. A lump rose to my throat. I felt horrible. My omma.
Then it was her turn. She too wondered if I was an impostor. My accent was no longer North Korean. She asked a few questions to which only I would know the answers. After I’d answered the last one, she tried to say something but choked on the word daughter. She was unable to speak. Then I too began to cry. Streams of hot tears rolled down my cheeks and onto my lap. We held our phones to our ears, a thousand miles apart, listening to the pent-up silence for several minutes without saying a word.
When I reflect on the pain I had caused my mother, I know it is something I cannot fully know. I may never fathom it completely, although maybe, when I have children of my own, I will begin to understand a part of her despair.
Hearing my mother’s voice brought me right back to original truth, as if a mooring had been pulled tight. For years my sense of identity had drifted. In Shenyang I had sometimes thought of myself as Korean-Chinese; in Shanghai I even sometimes thought of myself as South Korean. Her voice reactivated something strongly in me to do with identity. All the lies I’d spun around myself fell away. I was born and raised in Hyesan, on the banks of the Yalu River, in the province of Mount Paektu. I could not be anything else.
She told me that she had visited several fortune-tellers over the years since I’d been gone, ‘I don’t know where my daughter is but I miss her.’ She couldn’t say I was in China.
‘She is not in our land.’ Every one of them said that.
One said: ‘She is like the one tree growing on rock on the side of the mountain. It’s hard to survive. She is tough and she is smart. But she is lonely.’
‘She is well, do not worry,’ another said. ‘She is living like a nobleman’s wife in China.’
She told me she had even invited a shaman to the house to perform traditional ceremonies for my good fortune and safety in China. My mother reached out to me in the void like this, half believing and briefly comforted.
‘My daughter,’ she said to me.
We got into a routine of calling every weekend. Each time, my mother would call me and I would call her back. We’d talk for one or two hours. Sometimes, we spoke for so long I would fall asleep. Her voice was so comforting. The charges for these calls came to about 150 yuan ($20) a month, but sometimes it would be 300 yuan for a single call.
I had been away so long that it took weeks to catch up on all that had happened in Hyesan.
When my mother had reported me missing, the police were highly suspicious. She had to bribe them. After that, as I’d dreaded would happen, she and Min-ho were placed under close surveillance, by the banjang, the neighbours, and the local police. She and Min-ho moved house to a neighbourhood in Hyesan where nobody knew them. At work she received a promotion. This was not a sign of favour, but a way of bringing her into closer contact with the authorities, so that she could be more closely watched. One day a colleague whispered to her that he had been ordered to provide weekly reports on her for the past three years. He warned her to be careful. After that, she quit her job at the government bureau and got involved in the same business as Aunt Pretty – sending Chinese goods on the train for sale in Pyongyang and Hamhung.
My mother admitted that she had started to have negative thoughts about the Party and system. But she used highly coded language. In all of our conversations, she made the assumption that the Bowibu might be listening. The secret police were trying to catch cellphone users but they did not yet have the technology to detect signals.
The Bowibu, in fact, had already paid her a visit. I found the incident she described particularly unsettling.
My mother arrived home from work to find two plainclothes Bowibu officers waiting in the house with Min-ho. The one in charge started to ask about me.
‘He was extremely polite,’ she said. ‘It was chilling.’
He asked to see my photograph, and she showed him the family album. He leafed carefully through every page. ‘She’s very beautiful,’ he said, and then: ‘Would you describe for me again how she went missing?’
My mother told him what she’d reported to the police at the time.
He then made an extraordinary offer. If I was indeed in China, he said, and I paid 50,000 yuan (more than $6,000), I could come home to North Korea, have my old life back, and not face charges.
He sounded very conciliatory, but my mother baulked at the idea of me returning and publicly admitting where I’d been. It felt like a trap. She stuck to the story that I had gone missing.
My mother was convinced that she could get me home to North Korea without me having to admit anything, and she badly wanted me to come home. She had already spoken to the authorities about what would happen if I were to come back.
‘They said that, as you were not an adult when you left, you committed no crime.’
‘But the records will show I’ve been officially missing for years.’
‘We can pay to have the record changed. Look, you’re at an age when you should think of getting married. You have to marry in North Korea.’
‘Would it be safe to go back?’
‘I’ll make it safe for you.’ She was adamant.
We had this conversation many times. Returning to Hyesan, being united with her and my uncles and aunts, was a dream. But could I really cross back secretly and then report to the authorities as my mother was suggesting, saying that I was a child when I left and had committed no crime? The more I thought about it, the more I was tempted to make the decision to go home, and have the life I should have had. But a small insistent voice in my head was stopping me. A part of me knew that she and I were deluding ourselves. Returning now, after so many years away, was insanely dangerous.
On one occasion, my mother called me with an alarming question. Normally we spoke on the weekends, but this time her call came during the day while I was at work.
She sounded excited. ‘I’ve got a few kilos of ice.’
‘What?’ I sank down in my seat, out of sight of my colleagues.
She wanted to know if I had connections in China who could sell it.
Ice, or crystal methamphetamine, had long replaced heroin in North Korea as the foreign-currency earner of choice for the state. It’s a synthetic drug that is not dependent on crops, as heroin is, and can be manufactured to a high purity in state labs. Most of the addicts in China were getting high on crystal meth made in North Korea. Like the opium of the past, crystal meth, though just as illegal, had become an alternative currency in North Korea, and given as gifts and bribes.
‘Omma.’ My voice was a furious whisper. ‘Do you know what that is? It’s highly illegal.’
‘Well, lots of things are illegal.’
In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm? In North Korea the only laws that truly matter, and for which extreme penalties are imposed if they are broken, touch on loyalty to t
he Kim dynasty. This is well understood by all North Koreans. To my mother, the legality of the ice was a trifling matter. It was just another product to trade.
She said one of the big local traders brought it to the house because he knew I was in China and wondered if I could sell it there.
‘Give it back to him. Never get involved. There are bad people in that trade, and they won’t care if you’re caught.’
She never asked me again.
Sometimes, neither she nor Min-ho would call for two or three weeks. At those times, I couldn’t focus on anything. I became convinced they were in a Bowibu cell. I’d just stare at the phone and will it to ring. I’d made a special ringtone for their calls. It was a Korean comedy rap that went kong kong da, kong kong da. I’d start hearing the ringtone in my dreams and even imagine I’d heard it while I was awake. I would constantly check the phone. Then, weeks later, it would ring. My relief was overwhelming.
‘Power cuts,’ my mother might say. ‘I couldn’t charge the phone.’
This happened regularly, but each time I could never suppress my panic and paranoia.
On a weekend evening in spring 2004, I was enjoying a long chat with my mother. I had my feet up. The television was on in the background as usual, with the volume low. As we talked, I was distracted by news footage on the screen. Ok-hee was with me in the apartment. She noticed it too.
‘Omma, I’ll call you back,’ I said.
I grabbed the remote and turned the sound up.
The footage replayed in slow motion. A group of men, women and children were making a desperate bid to rush past some Chinese guards and enter a gate. It was the South Korean embassy in Beijing. Somehow they had distracted the guards, who were now lunging toward them and grabbing them to prevent them reaching South Korean diplomatic territory. One or two made it through, but a guard caught one woman by her coat and pulled her to the ground. The violence he used was shocking. He picked her up by her waist and carried her off. One of her shoes was left on the ground.
