by Hyeonseo Lee
The news anchor said they were North Koreans seeking political asylum.
Asylum?
Ok-hee and I stared at each other.
Chapter 33
The teddy-bear conversations
Over the following months, the television news showed similar events unfolding outside other countries’ embassies in Beijing, and even at a Japanese school. Sometimes none of the North Koreans made it through the gates, and they were hauled away by police and plainclothes agents. The howls of despair on their faces affected me deeply. These desperate bids for asylum were being filmed by a human-rights organization to highlight China’s inhumanity in refusing to treat escaped North Koreans as asylum seekers.
I thought of my uncle’s tirade against North Korea when I’d arrived in his apartment in Shenyang over six years ago, and the bizarre truths he’d told me about the Korean War, and the private life of Kim Jong-il. I’d refused to believe him. Ever since, I’d closed my mind to the reality of the regime in North Korea. Unless it directly affected my family, I had never wanted to know. I thought the reason people escaped was because of hunger, or, like me, out of an unexamined sense of curiosity. It had never occurred to me that people would escape for political reasons. I remembered the two South Korean filmmakers I’d met in Shenyang, who’d offered to pay the brokers’ fees for a defector trying to get to South Korea. I’d had cold feet because I thought I’d be treated as an exotic arrival from the North who’d have to give a press conference. Until now I’d had no idea of the sheer numbers – thousands each year – trying to escape, or that most of them did not want to live in China, but in South Korea.
The cellphone had transformed my life by reconnecting me with my family. Now, so too did the internet, linking me to what the world was saying about North Korea. I started discreetly researching online from cybercafés. My searches were narrow in scope to begin with. The first intriguing fact I learned was that so many North Koreans were now reaching South Korea that none of them had been asked to give a press conference in years.
I had been in Shanghai more than two years now. In that time I’d learned a great deal about South Korea from my colleagues. I regularly watched South Korean TV dramas. Some of them were such addictive viewing that Ok-hee and I would dash home to my tiny apartment and watch them together, lying on my roll-out mat. But I had never imagined myself in South Korea, until I saw these desperate people storming embassy gates. They were risking their lives. The reward had to be worth it.
The more I thought about it, the more the idea of living among South Koreans excited me. I was Korean and so were they. In China, however fluent my Mandarin, however official my ID, I would always be, at heart, a foreigner. This soon became the main topic of conversation between Ok-hee and me. The idea had taken a powerful hold over her, too. Could we go to South Korea together?
I knew I would do nothing so heroic as storming an embassy gate. With my Korean-Chinese ID I thought I could simply apply for a visa and fly to Seoul. From reading online, however, I learned that a visa wouldn’t be easy. The South Koreans would need to be convinced that I would return to China and not stay illegally.
Ok-hee had contacts with other North Koreans living secretly in Shanghai. (She was the sole North Korean I knew in the city.) It was she who found a broker. This man had a simple suggestion: she and I should pose as South Koreans who’d lost our passports. We would report the loss to the police, then go to the South Korean embassy in Beijing to apply for new ones. The broker would prepare the necessary documents. He wanted an advance of 10,000 yuan (about $1,400) from each of us on his fee. After a long discussion in a café in Longbai over cups of melon soya milk tea Ok-hee and I decided we’d go for it. We gave each other a high five. I went to bed that night with a sense of destiny.
The next day, however, as we stood in line at the bank to withdraw our money for the broker’s fee, Ok-hee was even quieter than usual, and continually twirling her hair. I knew her well enough to see that she had the jitters.
‘I’m not sure this is going to work,’ she said. ‘The fortune-teller told me it was not in my fortune this time to leave the country.’
‘It’ll work,’ I said. I felt confident.
‘I think we only have a fifty per cent chance. It could go either way.’
Her fear was that the broker would either take our money and disappear, or the documents he produced would look so phoney it would be too risky to use them.
I told her she was being paranoid. I thought our chances were good. If all went well, we’d soon begin a new life. I could still call my family, using the Chinese network, and even travel to Changbai when I had a South Korean passport. Naively, I thought that if we didn’t like South Korea, I might still eventually return home. I was still young. My mother was still trying to persuade me back.
In fact, Ok-hee’s fears and superstitions were well founded. Fortune, as I would soon find out, was not smiling on this venture.
I started to wind up my life in Shanghai, and get rid of my possessions. There was something final about this that I found unsettling, and it was mixed with deep feelings of guilt. I knew that my mother would be dead set against me going to South Korea.
Over the following days, these thoughts sent my spirits into a downward spiral. It was the result of a routine medical check-up that tipped me into depression. I was told my blood sugar level was dangerously high. In my despondent frame of mind I became convinced that I was about to die. Like the time I was in the hospital in Shenyang after the attack, I thought that if I died now, alone in my apartment, no one would know who I was. My mother would spend the rest of her life trying to find me. The little money I had in the bank would never reach her.
I stopped thinking about South Korea. I stopped caring about anything. I lay awake on my mat at night, watching the fluorescent lights blinking in the new office block built barely five yards from my apartment. My thoughts turned suicidal. I did not feel able to talk to anyone, not even to Ok-hee.
I bought a small teddy bear for company. Because I worried that I might faint and die while I was eating, I sat the bear at the table where he could watch over me. At first, we didn’t talk. But one evening after work I started talking to him as if he were a baby, in long babbling conversations. To ward off the loneliness of the apartment I set a timer so that the television came on thirty minutes before I got home. I criticized myself for wasting money on electricity, then ignored the criticism. Throughout that month, convinced that I was about to die alone without ever saying goodbye to my family, I was utterly broken.
I decided to blow my savings on expensive clothes. Just for once, I’ll live the good life, I thought. I couldn’t tell my mother that I was sick. Adding to her pain wouldn’t remove any of mine. I planned to keep up my calls to her until the last moment. I thought long and hard about how to explain the coming silence, and decided to tell her I was leaving for another country and wouldn’t be able to call North Korea any longer.
After a month living like this Ok-hee and other friends became so worried that they urged me to get another blood test. This time the results were normal. Apparently the blood sugar spike in the first test was to do with not having had any sleep the night before. I was given the all-clear, and all I had to show for myself were some overpriced clothes.
The self-pity and despondency lingered on in me for a few weeks, until an event in Hyesan shocked me out of it and pulled me back together.
Chapter 34
The tormenting of Min-ho
As part of my preparations to leave Shanghai, I had sent some money and almost all of my belongings to Mr Ahn’s house in Changbai. After the shipment had arrived there, I travelled to Changbai myself, my first visit since the ordeal with the gang.
I arrived on a clear night in early October 2004. Standing beneath the trees on the riverbank, I stared across at North Korea. The mountains were black against the constellations. Hyesan itself was in utter darkness. I could have been looking at forest, not at a
city. It was almost as if the sky was the substance. The city was the void, the nothing.
My country lay silent and still. I felt immensely sad for it. It seemed as lifeless as ash. Then, in the far distance, an ember – the headlights of a lone truck moving down a street.
Mrs Ahn greeted me with the news that Mr Ahn had died. He had struggled to recover from his injuries and had been very ill with diabetes. This affected me more than I expected. She invited me in. I saw his walking sticks and my eyes became heavy with tears. I had grown up with him always there, just across the river, a kind man my mother trusted. He had become my lifeline in China – the only connection I had to my family, to my past, to my real self.
Mrs Ahn helped me arrange the items I wanted to send across. They were everyday things, but they were rare and of great value in North Korea. I put my iron, hairdryer, some jewellery, vitamin pills, Chanel perfume, and all the other bits and pieces into two large blue sacks, and a smaller white one. I rolled up all of my cash, in US dollars and Chinese yuan, and put it in the small white sack. I called Min-ho and asked when I should send it.
‘Tomorrow during the day.’
‘In broad daylight?’
‘Don’t worry. The guards will be all right.’
Mrs Ahn hired two smugglers to carry the sacks across the river. When they returned, they said Min-ho had been waiting for them. Everything had gone smoothly. I breathed a sigh of relief, paid them their fee, and waited for Min-ho’s call.
No call came.
Nor did he call the next day. I walked along the riverbank, studying Hyesan. This was my first proper look at my old home since I’d left all those years ago. In the week I’d spent as a prisoner of the gang I never got a good view of it. The only traffic was a couple of military jeeps, and an ox pulling a cart. I’d never seen one of those in the city streets when I’d lived there. I could see a smiling portrait of Kim Il-sung on the side of a distant building, the only dash of colour. Everything looked dilapidated and poor. Nothing had changed. In China, nothing stayed the same. Everywhere was such a frenzy of construction and reinvention that a city could be unrecognizable within a year.
I could not stand still. With each passing hour my desperation mounted. Something had gone wrong. I waited two more days in Changbai, staying in a cheap hotel, the only place I had found open when I’d arrived so late at night. I couldn’t sleep from worry, and because the walls were so thin I heard men talking in the next room. They had strong North Korean accents. I didn’t know if they were Bowibu agents or smugglers, but it added to a presentiment I felt in my stomach, of dread and impending disaster. On the fourth day, after still no word from Min-ho, I returned to Shanghai.
A week later, just as I was leaving work to go home, my phone rang. It was Min-ho.
‘Nuna, what did you send?’
No greeting, just this blunt question.
‘An iron, a hairdryer, some vitamin pills, other stuff,’ I said.
I went through the list without mentioning the money. I asked him why he hadn’t called. He ignored my question and asked again: what had I put into the sacks?
‘I just told you.’
He hung up. I could make no sense of his call.
The next morning my phone rang again. A man spoke.
‘I am a friend of your mother’s,’ he said. His voice was deep and reassuring. He didn’t have a Hyesan accent. ‘There’s been a small problem because of the items you sent. I want to take care of matters for her, but I need to know how much money was in the sack.’
It was a curious twist of fate that I could be paranoid and suspicious of the most innocent and well-meaning people, but when real danger spoke mellifluously into the phone I did not suspect a thing.
‘Thank you for helping her,’ I blurted. I’d often wondered if my mother might meet another man. She was not yet fifty. I thought this might be a boyfriend.
‘You’re welcome. Now, you sent a hairdryer, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And an iron?’
‘Yes.’ He went through the list of items.
‘What about the money? How much was in there?’
‘I can’t remember how much now,’ I said. ‘My mother will know. You’d better ask her. I really appreciate your help.’
‘Not at all,’ he said, and ended the call.
A week later, Min-ho called again. I was in a Koreatown supermarket doing my grocery shopping.
‘You did well, Nuna,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Our calls for the past week have been recorded.’
I stopped still, in an aisle of globe artichokes and pak choi.
‘That man you spoke with was a senior army commander. He was calling from a conference room. The phone was on speaker so that others in the room could hear.’
Others?
He explained how he had borrowed a car in order to pick up the sacks at 2 p.m. Everything had been arranged with the border guards. But as he was loading the sacks into the car, a ranking army officer appeared in the distance on a bicycle, saw what was happening, and started yelling. The guards fled. Min-ho drove off at speed.
That night, seven or eight armed troops hammered on the door of the house. They searched, and found the two blue sacks but not the third, the small white one, which Min-ho had hidden outside the house. He and my mother were arrested and taken into custody at the Hyesan barracks of the Korean People’s Army. Under interrogation, Min-ho insisted that everything was contained in the two blue sacks. He denied any knowledge of a third white sack, even though the army officer was certain he had seen three sacks. They locked him in a cell. Shortly afterwards, two uniformed interrogators entered and started beating him around his head with rubber blackjacks, and kicking him. Still he denied everything. He knew how much cash was in the white sack – I had told him. He said he’d rather die than let these bastards have it.
Oh, Min-ho.
I stood frozen listening to this, with my basket at my feet and mothers with children jostling past me.
From her cell, my mother could hear my brother’s cries and howls as he was thrashed. She hoped he’d confess immediately but he didn’t. Minute after minute it went on. She couldn’t bear it. She banged on the iron door of her cell as hard as she could and yelled that she would tell them what they wanted to know. She confessed straight away to the small white sack and told them where it was hidden.
The amount of money took the soldiers by surprise. They called in a senior army commander. He said he had never seen so large a sum coming across the border. He thought it was a fund sent by South Korean spies, and that I might be an agent of the South Korean intelligence service, the Angibu. That was when they made Min-ho call me. When they heard my voice, they exchanged glances. The fact I no longer spoke with a North Korean accent was not a good sign. It increased their suspicion that I was a South Korean agent.
When the call came from the senior army commander, of course I had no idea what was happening. It was just as well, because my responses and my relaxed manner convinced him that I had acted privately and had just wanted to send some items and cash to my family. The army officers then presented my mother and Min-ho with a deal. Under normal circumstances, they said, the two of them should go to a prison camp. However, if they agreed to say nothing, they would be released. They agreed. The officers then gave the hairdryer and some of the vitamins to my mother, leaving her a few in each bottle, and stole everything else, including all the cash, my hard-earned savings.
Months had now gone by since Ok-hee and I had last heard from the broker who was meant to be preparing documentation for our supposedly ‘lost’ South Korean passports. With the alarming events in Hyesan, and the continuing delay, we became more and more nervous. What happened next convinced me that our fortunes were flowing in a very bad direction.
In a brief and urgent call my mother told me that she and Min-ho were departing Hyesan immediately to stay with Aunt Pretty in Hamhung. She would not
be able to contact me again for some time.
Just days after she and Min-ho had been released by the army, Pyongyang had ordered one of its periodic crackdowns against corruption and capitalism. A team of Bowibu special investigators had arrived in the city. The neighbours knew that my mother had been in some kind of trouble. They had seen armed troops at her house. They denounced her and she was ordered to appear at the Bowibu headquarters in Hyesan, where she was told to wait, and waited for hours. She knew that people who entered that place sometimes did not come out. She asked to use the bathroom. Then she locked the door, climbed out through a tiny window, jumped over a wall, and ran down the street. The situation had become too serious even for my mother to solve with her usual bribes and persuasion. But she also knew how it went with these campaigns from Pyongyang – if you made yourself scarce while the investigation was on, you could usually return quietly when it had all blown over, without consequences. She closed up the house, and called to tell me she was leaving.
That settled it. Everything seemed dogged by such ill fortune that I became afraid. Using fake documents to obtain South Korean passports now seemed like the worst idea I’d ever had. It would most surely end in catastrophe, with Ok-hee and me being repatriated to North Korea. Ok-hee agreed.
We called the broker and cancelled the arrangement.
It was three months before my mother felt it safe to return to Hyesan. She took the precaution of presenting a new Chinese refrigerator and a large sum of cash to the head of the investigation team in order to have her name removed from the list of suspects, and went back to her house. The next-door neighbours who’d denounced her stared at her as if they’d seen a ghost. She had to greet these upstanding citizens and smile as if everything had been a harmless misunderstanding. ‘The rumour was that you’d been deported to a prison camp,’ they said. They had expected government officials to come any day to take possession of her house. Once she was inside and had closed the front door she sank to the floor. She realized she’d soon have to move again, to a new neighbourhood.
