Stars Between the Sun and Moon (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

Our cell was
lit by one reddish light bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling. At Chongjin Jipgyulso, the guards gave us soap, and every morning we could bathe using a pump that brought water to us from deep under the earth. We would stand in our cells, blankets hiding our nakedness from the guards pacing outside the metal bars, and clean off the dirt that was so thick on our bodies when we first arrived it left streak marks on the floor. All of us had lost our pride, but slowly we began to see in each other the paleness of our true skin colour returning.

There was one woman who never washed. I never saw her leave the cell. She was crippled, I thought at first, because she remained in a squat position. Then in whispered conversations, as the female prisoners sat in rows to pick lice from each other's hair, we heard the story of this woman from some long-term inmates.

In a room set off from the kitchen was a big metal tank containing salty water, which the cooks used to marinate the cabbage we found in our broth. This woman, hoping she could escape from the prison at night, hid herself inside the tank, submerging her body except for her nose. But the guards always counted us as we lined up to use the washroom in the mornings and the evenings. They knew the woman was gone, and when they found her, she was beaten so badly her back would never straighten again. She was younger than I was, in her mid-twenties, but she looked like one of the haggard old women who sold rotting eggs in the rural markets.

Exactly what had happened to the woman during the beating by the guards was unknown for she no longer said a word to anyone. But I had an idea to try and get her to clean. Once a week, women prisoners had the cell to ourselves. We stripped off all our clothes to pick lice from each other's bodies. I helped the woman to take off her shirt and pants. It was challenging, because she could not straighten her legs. Everyone gasped when she was finally naked. Where this woman's vagina should have been there was nothing but a black hole.

Chongjin Jipgyulso was
a labour camp, too. But the city, located on the coast of the east sea, was a major port of entry to all of Chosun. Our jobs were not inside the prison, but at the harbour. Some prisoners unloaded supplies from the ships onto wagons, which would then be taken to the train station. I volunteered to work at the train station, where I would unload boxes of supplies from these wagons and stack them in a room. I assumed this was for storage, until a train came that would take the supplies to the rest of the country. I never opened the boxes, and I could not tell if they contained food. But there was a lot coming into Chosun—boxes upon boxes in ships upon ships every day. I knew better than to ask questions, though I wondered where those supplies were going when the people in Chongjin had so little.

Every few days, at midday, the guards would give me some noodles and kimchi. At night our meals were broth with a few pieces of cabbage. I had vowed to stay alive, inspired by the source of light at the end of the poplar trees, so I forced myself every day to carry more, to move faster, to be as diligent as I could be in stacking the boxes. The guards, pleased with my work, started giving me a little extra kimchi.

In my cell was a woman who did no labour and rarely left the prison. She was already three months pregnant when I arrived, and the father of her child was in the men's cell. But she could not visit him. She cried every night, holding her belly, and screamed with night terrors. She told me that she was afraid the guards would abort her child.

“Surely they wouldn't do anything that vicious!” I exclaimed. “But you're going to lose the child if you do not have better food. A child can't grow on a wilted piece of cabbage and broth.” I played the food game with her. We ran our tongues over all the words for foods we longed to taste when we were released.

That night, my dream of the road came again, but this time I was farther down the corridor, amidst the poplar trees. I awoke hopeful, as if a golden light was pulling me forward. In the rays of that light, I realized that survival was far more than just having enough food. Even where there was a bounty of food, like in China, if there was no love, no compassion, there was only death in life. In that dream I came to see that my survival would be based on how much I became one with the others. From that day on, whenever I worked at the train station, I grabbed extra rations of kimchi and hid it in my underwear. I gave it to the pregnant woman when I returned to our cell. I watched her stomach swell. As I started to see life again inside her, life pulsed through me, too.

I encouraged other women who were strong and fit like me to take extra food, to stuff it in their underclothes and give it to the older women in the prison cell who walked with limps or could not see because of cataracts. As if the food we were giving away had become the Chinese foods of our imagination, we all appeared to grow stronger in spirit.

A few times a week, some other women and I were given the task of carrying the heaviest boxes and bags from the port to the train station, many weighing as much as twenty-five kilos. As reward, we were given unprocessed rice. We took twice if not three times as much as we were allotted. We ripped open the seams in our jacket pockets and hid the grains in there. Back in our cell, we used a brick to crack open and remove the heavy casing. Our cell bordered the kitchen, and when the cooks had left, some of us snuck in there to cook the rice. We ate some ourselves, but most we gave away to the weakest among us.

The guards rotated the position of putting each one of us in charge of the cell. Whoever was in charge had to settle the bickering, the name-calling, the hair pulling and the fistfights that erupted and made us forget our bonds with each other.

One such incident involved Sooil, a heavyset woman from a village not far from where I grew up, who had moved to China to marry a Chinese man. She would sit during our lice checks with a straight back and neck and wave her long fingers in the air as she talked. She rattled on nonstop, like a chicken cackling, about how good her husband was, how many pastries and rice cakes she had eaten in China, and how her husband and his sister were so wealthy they had showered her with jewellery, including gold rings and earrings. “Which I swallowed,” she said once. “It's all inside my belly. My husband loved me so much,” she exclaimed, closing her eyes and wrapping her arms around herself to mimic his affection, “he even gave me jade.” I smiled, for I knew this was Sooil's version of the Chinese food game.

“My sister-in-law, the rich one,” she announced another time, “lives in Guangzhou.” A collective gasp filled the room. I knew she meant the capital city of Guangdong province. I knew Chinese geography because at night Jungsoo had taught me. But I saw some of the younger women wink at each other. They had their own version of a golden light . . . 
revenge
.

The next day, Sooil was forced to stand at the front of the cell, beneath the poster of the Ten Commandments. She had to announce her name and tell us that she had committed the most heinous of crimes, though we would not be told what her sin was for another few days. No one knew her betrayer, but betrayed she was. For two days after that, she was made to stand outside in a thin shirt and pants in the shadow of the doorframe, where the wind was strongest and the sun could not penetrate. She was not allowed to speak to anyone. Her teeth chattered, and her skin turned blue.

On the morning of the third day, she was made to stand underneath the Ten Commandments again. The other prisoners interrogated her in much the same fashion as my comrades at school had me during saenghwalchonghwa.

“You have ties to South Korea,” spat one of the women.

“Gwangju City, I heard you say,” another yelled. “Your sister-in-law lives in South Korea.” Fingers were pointed at her. Some of the women spat.

I was pushed to the back of the room as Sooil's attackers hurled insults at her. Sooil sobbed like a baby, saliva dripping down her chin and onto her chest. “Braggart! Arrogant! Cheater! You think you are better than us!”

I yelled too, asking a question, but my voice could not be heard over the women in front.

“I wish the guards would cut you open to find that gold you say you swallowed,” a stocky woman with bowlegs yelled.

A hush fell over the room. The prisoners put in charge of settling disputes that day shook their heads. The stocky woman's words went too far, since the guards might actually do what her attackers described. That comment might have condemned one of our own to death, and even those among us who were the most bitter didn't want that crime on their hands.

A tall woman with elegant features spoke up at the same time I did. “Does your sister-in-law live in Gwangju in South Korea or Guangzhou in China?” we asked.

Sooil looked up, her eyes red and swollen. “China,” she said, clamping her clammy hands together.

The woman who had revealed Sooil's claim of swallowing gold told the guards she had lied. For her penance, she had to spend one day outside in the cold, exactly as Sooil had done.

In the days that followed, the elegant woman and I began talking. She told me she had been in the Chosun military, something quite rare for a woman. That winter, the elegant woman got into trouble over soap. We were given one bar to share among us. The woman who had been in the military saw another woman slip the tiny bar inside her vagina, stealing it for herself. The military woman accosted the thief, pushing her when she refused to disclose the truth. Eventually, the thief pulled out the bar of soap and gave it to the guard. But the military woman was punished for fighting. Both she and the woman who had stolen the soap had to stand outside our cell, their backs straight, their knees locked, from sun up until sunset for three days. They weren't given food or water.

I felt so sorry for them I didn't eat my lunch at my job. I hid the mushy noodles in my jacket and some kimchi in my pants. When I got to the cell, I dug the food out and gave it to them.

“I will repay you,” they said in unison.

“Repay me by living,” I replied. “You stay alive, and we will meet again in China.”

By the end of one month in prison, I had made more than twenty such pacts with other women.

February 16 was
Kim Jong-il's birthday. That morning, the women in my cell were partnered and told by the guards to stay out of trouble until we reached our final destination. As we marched to the train station, the woman whose slim wrist was handcuffed to my own whispered to me: “Run when I tell you. When we have a chance, we should try to escape.”

“How can we break free from these?” I questioned, rattling the metal that attached our hands.

“With a pin,” she said.

“I don't have one.” I shook my head.

“I do.”

She wore a long, green woollen sock as a scarf. She pulled it off and wrapped it around our handcuffs. Soon I felt her picking the lock.

But the pin did not work and we were still attached when we reached the train station.

The guards pointed at the prisoners, directing each pair to various lines.

“Even if we are handcuffed, let's run away,” my partner said under her breath.

I nodded.

As we moved down the platform, I took a good look at the woman tugging me forward. She caught me staring and smiled. She was toothless like so many women in Chosun now.

“Start walking backwards,” she said quietly.

We started sliding our feet backwards in unison, as if we had been attached to each other forever. People bumped into us. A few prisoners swore when their faces came flush up against our backs. But we didn't stop until we reached the end of the platform. We paused briefly to scan the station. The guards we could see were all busy directing the other prisoners. We slid our feet backwards again. Then we were outside, where giant droopy snowflakes fell around us.

“Now,” she said, spinning me around with such force I lost my balance and stumbled. I jumped up quickly, my arm already sore from where the muscles had torn. But we didn't stop. We walked almost at a run to the end of an alley, turned a corner, then plunged into the crowd on the main street.

Chapter Twenty-five

It wasn't long
before I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt, forcing me to stop.

“You stupid bitches,” a man said in a deep gruff voice.

The guard slipped his face in between the other woman's face and mine. “If you're going to run away, do it properly, not with handcuffs on,” he added loudly.

He pushed us along, back to the train station, where we were taken to the room where I usually unloaded boxes and bags from the trains. Three other guards joined him. They slapped our faces and then kicked our stomachs, knocking us to the floor. When they stopped, I spat out blood. All four of them escorted us back to the train platform to wait.

“You know, it's Kim Jong-il's birthday,” one of the guards said. He was young with full cheeks and innocent eyes, what I imagined Sungmin would look like when he reached military age.

I nodded.

“Something good was going to happen to you today.”

“What?” I croaked, my throat dry.

“Due to the generosity of General Kim Jong-il, prisoners like you who entered China for food are being granted amnesty.”

Tears of relief filled my eyes. “We're going home?”

“No,” the young guard said, shaking his head. His eyes were downcast. It caused him pain to give us this news, I could sense that. “You tried to escape with the handcuffs. The handcuffs are expensive and a crime to steal. You were going home. But now you are going to prison, and you'll be tried and sentenced instead.”

I felt a cry rise from deep in my stomach, and I began to cry like a baby.

My partner and
I were sent to the detention centre in Yuseon. The town was a mere shadow of what it once had been, I could see as we moved through the streets. It was mid-afternoon when we arrived. The sky was clear, and the setting winter sun illuminated the black of the villagers' faces and their ragged clothes, bare feet and sunken eyes. I searched every face as I walked but recognized no one.

In the days that followed, however, my mother was notified that I was there. She began coming to the prison, though I never saw her. Twice a day, she left me food that the guards passed on to me. I felt terrible when I received bowls of kimchi and corn rice with soy and bean paste, for I knew she was feeding me better than she was feeding herself. I was also eating better than the other prisoners in my cell. The guards told me my mother had bribed them with Chinese cigarettes so she could leave enough food in the mornings to be dispersed to me throughout the day.

The woman I had tried to escape with had nothing to eat. Her family had either not been informed that she was in prison or they didn't care. She never told me her name but after a week in the cell together, she confided that her husband had left her before she moved to China and that her daughter had gone missing. “She was sold to a Chinese man,” she said in a dull voice. I began sharing my food with her, some days going with less than half my portion.

One of the guards was nicer than the others, and he let us stand up in our cells for a few minutes every hour he was on duty, so that we could stretch our cramped legs. We were confined to our cells twenty-four hours a day now and it was difficult to lift my legs more than three times in a row.

Sometimes I moved my hands through the air like swallows in flight, the way I had seen the Chinese do in the parks in Beijing.

“I don't think I will ever see her again,” the woman told me. “I just hope he is a kind man, the man to whom my daughter was sold. That is my only wish for her.”

One day when the more compassionate guard had started his shift, he stuck his head through the bars of our cell. The other three inmates who were there when we arrived had been granted amnesty and released. “Something good is coming to you,” the guard said to me, ordering me to stand up and stretch. I was to take another train, he also said.

I knew where I was being sent. My next journey would most certainly be to Jeungsan Kyohwaso, where I would be tried and sentenced. The other prisoners had told me that eventually I would have to pass through there. I would be going alone. But the guard had said something good would come, so I was hopeful I would be granted my own amnesty soon. I smiled at him and bowed to show my gratitude.

“We call this
place the bathroom,” the woman beside me said, her breath so stale it was suffocating.

“Why?” I whispered. At the larger district detention centre in Yuseon, I shared my new cell with about fifteen women. Inside the cell, we formed two lines with the newest inmates at the front, and sat all day and all night staring at the wall.

“Because this is a shit hole,” my cellmate said. She smelled of urine. Her feet were black, her toenails missing or broken. Her mouth hung open, and she was breathing heavily, likely from a respiratory illness. She was missing many of her teeth, and those that remained were stained yellow. Her gums were as black as the dirt on her feet. I wondered, looking at her, when I too would begin to come that close to death.

A large urine stain marked the front of her pants. The woman saw me notice it.

“You have to ask to go to the bathroom here,” she explained, her eyes flicking to the stall in the corner of the room where there was a toilet. “If the good guard is on duty, we can talk and also use the toilet. If we have a bad guard, he'll say no. So we go in our pants, and then we're beaten when he sees.”

“When did you
cross?” my interrogator demanded. “Was it morning? Evening? Where did you cross?”

I sat on a metal chair in a small, dark room, across the table from a young officer. He was also a
yehshimwon
, he explained to me, someone who passed judgments on prisoners.

I held my quivering legs steady. “I crossed for food,” I repeated. “No one arranged a marriage for me. There were no traffickers involved.”

“What about your brother?” he asked. “He has not been seen in months.”

I fell silent. I didn't know how to reply. I should have known they would question me about my family. But I wasn't prepared. My mind churned. What if Hyungchul had been caught and had told his interrogators I was married in China? What if he was helping people leave Chosun? What if he was a human trafficker?

“I saw my brother a few times in China,” I said cautiously, hoping that if he was in custody, he was telling the same story. “He came for food as well. He was not trafficked, nor has he trafficked anyone.”

“He's always back and forth,” the officer said. “We want to find him.”

My interrogator was healthy and fit. I stared at his thin pink lips.

“Is your brother a trafficker?” he asked again and again, ignoring my answers otherwise.

“No,” I repeated. “My brother is simply a petty trader.”

On the third day of my interrogation, the officer scribbled a few words onto some papers in front of him. “You know running away with metal handcuffs is a serious offence.”

“I know,” I said, lowering my eyes.

“You will be sentenced to three years. But consider yourself lucky. In the autumn, a few months from now, is the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Party. You will be released on that day. You will receive amnesty if you are good. Those with sentences of three years or less will be pardoned. Those with sentences of five years will have them reduced to three. Today,” he concluded, “is a good day for you.”

Back in my
cell, I shared my news with the others.

“You are fortunate,” said one woman. “A sentence of three years or less means you will avoid going to Kyohwaso. There prisoners are not fed at all. You would be worked to death. You would contract skin diseases and die from diarrhea. It is a death camp.”

“Kyohwaso is where they put the human traffickers,” another woman added. “And those who are disloyal to the state by trying to defect to the South.”

“I was in Kyohwaso,” a third woman spoke up. She was older, with bald patches on her head and a rash covering her face and arms.

“Why were you released?” another woman asked.

“I was sentenced to death,” she said matter-of-factly, her eyes fixed on the white wall. “I was brought here to be executed.”

“My yehshimwon was kind,” I said to the woman, trying to console her. “Maybe your yehshimwon will have a kind heart too?”

“There is no such thing,” she said, turning an icy stare on me.