A Thousand Miles to Freedom (2 page)

I often meet up with my friends in Sinchon, a student neighborhood, to drink
maekju
, a local beer, in the bars that never seem to close. In the bars we also eat dried octopus and grilled
jjukkumi
, a “baby” species with five arms each—a real treat. They are small enough that you can swallow them in just one bite. My friends refuse to believe me when I tell them seafood is fresher and tastier in North Korea. But it's true! They don't always understand me, because I come from a different world entirely. And most people could never even begin to imagine this other world where I was born and raised.

*   *   *

The high-speed train vibrates below my feet. All around me,
ajuma
s
—
the Korean term used to address married or middle-age women—watch their favorite shows on their cell phones with antennas sticking out. Some students, perched atop their high heels and holding on to the train's metal bars for balance, are listening to their iPods. Others, staring into their pocket mirrors, are applying mascara. They disdainfully ignore the street vendor trying to sell his Frank Sinatra CDs. Talking through speakers on wheels that he drags along behind him, the vendor tries to peddle his CD collection to the older gentlemen on the train. As the train travels from station to station, the platforms fill up and empty almost mechanically.

The silence of the South Korean metro allows me to ruminate for a moment. I begin reflecting on my memories of the train stations in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, that I visited with my dad such a long time ago. The stations were so magnificent and luxurious, with big beautiful purple chandeliers, like something you might expect to see in a major Hollywood film. The train stations in Seoul are much blander. I will remember the trip we made to Pyongyang for the rest of my life. I was nine years old, and we were by ourselves, Keumsun, my father, and me. Mom didn't come with us; she preferred to stay back home and take care of things at the apartment. Even though the famine was already taking hold and we had nothing to eat, the trip to Pyongyang felt magical. There weren't any skyscrapers in sight, but we saw a hotel under construction that reached a hundred and fifty meters in height. Workers and machines dangled from the top of the hotel. From such a distance, they appeared so tiny that they looked like little ants.

*   *   *

Only three stations now separate me from the Sogang University campus, and my heart starts beating faster and faster as the train accelerates. The speed of the train makes me feel a certain melancholy in my heart: it reminds me that I am from a completely different world. Where I'm from, it took two long days to get from Eundeok, the little town where we lived, to Chongjin, just ninety-five kilometers away, where my grandparents lived. The trip to Chongjin was always an exhausting one. We would pass through frigid temperatures, and we were always crammed together in the train like farm animals
.
We relieved ourselves of bodily waste using little tins we carried with us. If we moved, we would lose our spot to someone else. In South Korea, I can travel the same distance in under twenty minutes on a high-speed train. Back in North Korea, only the capital had modern amenities, like the metro stations that I found so dazzling.

I now find myself thinking of everyone I left behind, all of the people from whom I have heard nothing at all since I left my country. Then I was eleven years old, hungry, and without a home. My aunts, my uncles, my friends at school … have they survived the famine? On the train, another rider stares at me out of the corner of his eye, as if I am some outsider who doesn't belong here. Still, I have tried my hardest to blend in, with my high heels, short skirt, and tight jacket. Whether or not I have succeeded in looking like I'm from South Korea, the reality is that I was born in Eundeok, a small industrial village in North Hamgyong Province, on August 15, 1986, in North Korea. In my quest for liberty and freedom, I have finally reached South Korea, after a nine-year journey across China and Mongolia. Here in Seoul, I have a passport. I no longer have to live in hiding, and I have built a new life for myself.

However, my memories of the north regularly come back to me, and one question in particular still haunts me: Why must the people of my home country continue to live in such suffering? Since arriving in Seoul, I have learned, through reading various books and newspapers, that the misery in North Korea is the fault of an absurd totalitarian regime. The country is a complete economic disaster. The Kim family dynasty, the world's only communist dynasty, ruthlessly crushes any dissent.

These answers do not satisfy me and do little to assuage the unease in my heart. On the contrary, in fact, these answers make me feel totally powerless. I live barely forty kilometers from the barbed-wire border that separates me from my homeland, and yet there is nothing that I can do for my people, who are drained of energy by the famine and by the repression of an unrelenting totalitarian regime. For the twenty-five million people who live there, North Korea has become a true hell on earth, forgotten by the rest of the world. Even South Koreans, who share the same blood heritage, seem to have forgotten about the plight of their northern counterparts. At times, I feel overwhelmed by this sense of helplessness, by the feeling that there is nothing I can do to help my brothers and sisters to the north.

*   *   *

“Sinchon Station.”

The robotic voice coming from the loudspeakers breaks the silence of the train and pulls me away from my thoughts. I get off the train and start walking up the stairs in my usual automaton-like manner. This time, however, as soon as I step back aboveground, I decide that I will no longer sit back and do nothing. I have to tell my story to the world. I have to tell my story to give a voice to the millions of North Koreans who are dying slowly and in silence. And I have to tell the world about the hundreds of thousands among them who have tried to escape from that hellhole, who are presently in hiding in China, fearing for their lives. Here I am, twenty-two miles deep into the promised land of South Korea. And yet here, refugees from the north are still treated as second-class citizens, when the only sin we are guilty of is refusing to die from starvation.

Because my North Korean brothers and sisters do not have the ability to speak out for themselves, I am writing on their behalf. One day, I am sure, the two Koreas will reunite. It will be a long, complicated process, but it
will
happen. For the Korean peninsula to reunite, we are going to need the help of the entire world. But in order to find the solution, we first must understand the roots of the problem.

Since that fateful day in December when I was eleven years old, the day I wrote my will, I have, along with my mother and my sister, found some of these roots.

This is my story.

 

3

As a young girl, I never could have imagined that my life would change so quickly and so drastically. I didn't know it then, but after the winter of 1997, I would no longer have my childhood. For many years, up until I was nine years old, I was a very happy little girl. I had everything I could possibly want in life.

*   *   *

Eundeok, my hometown, was located on the northeastern tip of the mountainous country of North Korea, fewer than fifteen kilometers away from the Tumen River, which separated the country from China and Russia
.
On the other side of the river, it took less than one hour to get to the sea. During the winter it was bitterly cold, and the snow stayed for weeks on end under an immense blue sky. Sometimes, I had to go to school trudging through a thick fog of white. My birthday, on the other hand, was in the middle of summer and was always warm and humid. It was on the same date that we celebrated the day Korea was liberated from Japanese rule in 1945. My birthday was always a very happy time.

Although it was surrounded by factories, my hometown was not very large. In just one hour, you could tour the entire town. On the horizon, you could make out a few trees on the mountains far away, but the nearby hills were all stripped bare, because the forests had been razed for firewood. Before reaching the first few buildings in town, you would find several mines that had become famous; many former, now disgraced, leaders from Pyongyang had been sent to work in them as punishment. The army also had several bases nearby, just like they do everywhere else in the country. We lived in perpetual fear of an invasion from the United States or from their ally, South Korea. Whenever I climbed the mountains to collect mushrooms, I caught sight of some large cannons, more or less hidden in the landscape. A little farther up, there were some barracks that we tried to avoid, because the men in the army had a bad reputation. They often abused their power to take advantage of poor people or those less fortunate. If a group of soldiers ran into a man smoking a cigarette, for instance, they could ask him to hand over his pack of cigarettes. If the man said no, the soldiers would make sure he learned to never refuse them again.

In the middle of Eundeok flows a river, with a large bridge linking either side. I sometimes liked to wade in that river, from which I lived ten minutes away by foot. The biggest buildings in the city, all made of gray cement, with balconies painted white or pink, had at most five floors. There were no advertisements anywhere. All of the walls there were either bare or plastered with propaganda praising our “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il and the “socialist paradise” he had created for us in North Korea. The building in which I lived was only three floors, with heavily cracked walls.

“This building is bound to collapse,” all the neighbors used to say.

In spite of everything, for the first few years of the 1990s, I generally felt pretty content. Nothing made me happier than to have my father pick me up after school. Some days, he would take me to the movies, using tickets he had gotten ahold of as a result of his connections at work. He worked at a weapons factory called “January 20th,” named in commemoration of the day that Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea, paid it a personal visit. In North Korea, the names of most buildings were dates, in honor of visits from North Korean leaders. This policy of naming things after dates was one of the practices meant to maintain the cult of propaganda surrounding our heads of state, but it was only much later that I understood this.

Every time we went to the movies, my dad would meet me in front of the theater during the afternoon. I walked to the theater all by myself, like I was a real adult. But it was not enough to simply have a ticket. The hardest part was finding a seat, because people always rushed to get into the theater. So my dad would mount me up high upon his shoulders as we made our way through the crowd. Going to the movies and sitting on my dad's shoulders in the darkened theater were some of the happiest moments of my life. We watched films about brave heroes fighting against the imperialist Japanese colonizers. All around the screen, there were inscriptions that read, “Let us all unite behind the great general Kim Jong-il!”

Sometimes, my dad would also take me to street vendors to buy some
naengmyeon
, “cold noodles,” a North Korean specialty from Pyongyang. We would bring a bowl, and my dad would proudly present the young lady working there with food coupons given to him by the government. After receiving the noodles, we would take them home to eat. I had never tasted anything so delicious. Even if there wasn't quite enough to satisfy our hunger, that couldn't ruin the happiness I felt at being able to eat these noodles.

In those years, my parents would never have been able to imagine that they would soon be dying of hunger, because they came from “good” families. That is to say, their families were part of the elite class; they had connections in the army and in the Workers' Party, which ruled North Korea. When my parents were very young, they both lived in Pyongyang, a privileged city reserved only for the elite. My grandfather was a highly ranked officer who dreamed of one day sending my mother to Kim Il-sung University, the most prestigious university in our country and the school where Kim Jong-il himself had studied. To ensure my mom could get the good grades necessary for admission, her father bribed the teachers by renovating the playground. Unfortunately for him, my mom was a tomboy who didn't really care much for school—she wanted to become a driver. What's more, on the day of the big university-entrance exam, she arrived late. And just like that, my grandfather's ambitious plans for my mother collapsed.

Since then, however, my mother has proven herself to be a person of remarkably strong character, a trait which, without a doubt, saved my life. She was essentially the head of our house. She's not very imposing in size, but she is highly intelligent and very determined. Even when she falls ill, her face still looks healthy and strong and doesn't show anything out of the ordinary. In this respect, I am a lot like my mother. When I was little, any time I was feeling sick, I could never get anyone to believe me because I still appeared healthy, and I was always sent off to school anyway. Maybe it was this ability that allowed me to survive while others did not.

In Eundeok, it was my mother who, thanks to her job working at the hospital, provided the household with food. Whatever food we needed she brought from the cafeteria at work, which kept us from going hungry for many years. She often complained about my father and his lack of common sense. She found him to be both too na
ï
ve and not physically strong enough. I remember looking at their wedding photo and thinking that he looked fairly robust
,
but then I would have to remind myself again that in reality, he had indeed become quite frail. Once, my mother sent him out to steal corn from the cornfields, so that we could have something to eat. Not only did he come back empty-handed, but he was also missing his coat. He must have given it to the farmers who caught him in the act and threatened to denounce him to the regime. Mom was
furious.
In Korea, if a man wants a woman to respect him, he needs to be strong. Their marriage was arranged by my maternal grandmother as my mom was leaving Pyongyang for Chongjin, the large port city on the eastern shore of North Korea.