The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (15 page)

I explained that I wanted to visit my relatives in Shenyang for a few days.

‘I was wondering if I could spend the night … and if you could help me get there tomorrow. I don’t have any money. My relatives will pay you back.’ I lowered my eyes. I had not thought this through. It had been years since I’d seen my relatives from Shenyang. I felt my face redden. ‘Or if they don’t, my mother will, when I get back.’

Mr Ahn frowned again and scratched the back of his neck. He must have known then that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. After a while he said: ‘Do you know how far it is to Shenyang?’

I had only the vaguest notion of this city. I thought it was nearby, maybe an hour away on the bus.

‘It’s an eight-hour journey,’ he said, watching his words sink in. ‘And the bus is dangerous because you don’t have ID and you don’t speak Mandarin. There’s a police checkpoint along the way.’

This was another serious matter I had not fully considered – the possibility of getting caught. Any North Koreans found illegally in China were handed over to the
Bowibu
.

‘It’s all right.’ The stricken look on my face amused him. ‘I can take you, if you really want to go. But we’ll have to get there in a taxi.’

I realize now what an extraordinary imposition I was making on him and what a kindness he was doing me. I thanked him, but he held up his palm. He’d been trading with my mother for years, he said. He valued her custom and trusted her.

In the morning, after we’d eaten breakfast, Mrs Ahn began cooking a huge pot of
nooroongji
. This is the rice at the bottom of the pot that gets a little burned and is crisp on the outside.

‘I make this for the North Korean visitors,’ she said. ‘They stop by here at night. Some of them we know. Others are strangers. It happens all the time. If I make this, it’s easy just to add some water and heat it up.’

She told me about two strangers who had knocked on the door a year ago. They were emaciated and very weak. They ate a whole potful, enough for twenty people. ‘It was awful to watch. They were like wild animals afraid the food would be taken from them. I knew they were eating too quickly. They had to rush outside and puke it all up.’

I could see that the Ahns were not rich. Their home was not like the ones I had seen in the Chinese TV dramas. They had no servants, or a microwave, or a bathroom with gold taps. In fact, it wasn’t as nice as our house. But they had plenty of food.

That morning, Mr Ahn showed me Changbai. It felt most odd to be walking among buildings I’d been seeing all my life from the other side of the river, as if I’d passed through a mirror. It was a small town, with pharmacies, window displays filled with ladies’ shoes of many styles; cosmetics shops, and food everywhere – in cheap canteens, in supermarkets; in colourful packages displayed in kiosks; in the hands of school kids with spiky hair, eating in the street.

Mr Ahn gave me cash to buy some warm winter half-boots and a light-green Chinese-style padded winter coat. These would make me look more Chinese. I had already cut my hair in the style that was fashionable then for girls in China – like men’s, long at the front and short at the back.

The next morning we set off as the sky was lightening. Mr Ahn sat next to me in the back of a new taxi car. This in itself was a thrill. I had seldom been in a civilian car. This one had a sound system for the radio. The road ran for a short distance along the river, the border itself. I could not take my eyes from the view of Hyesan. It had snowed heavily overnight, giving the houses domed roofs, like white mushrooms. I could see the Victorious Battle of Pochonbo Memorial in the park, its statues wearing wigs of ice, and my elementary school. The city seemed lost in time. Every building was weathered and grey. Only the snow-clad mountains in the background looked new – brilliant against the neon-blue tint of the dawn.

Two North Korean guards in long coats were patrolling the path along the far bank, watching the women, padded and muffled against the cold, who had climbed down to the river and made holes in the ice to fill their pails.

Rabbit-fur for the soldiers who keep us safe; scrap iron for their guns, copper for their bullets.

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.

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.