The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (17 page)

There was an awkward pause after the introductions were made. I looked at my aunt. To my mortification, she said: ‘Now, why don’t you youngsters go out for an ice cream?’

In an ice-cream parlour near my uncle and aunt’s apartment, I saw that Geun-soo was even more uncomfortable than I was. To put him at his ease I suggested we share a tub of my favourite, the heavenly purple taro. He seemed to relax a little. He was twenty-two, he told me, and had two older sisters. He’d graduated from a university in Shenyang, but seemed in no hurry to find a job. His family ran a successful chain of restaurants, and had money. He spoke with great deference about his widowed mother, more than I would have expected from a young man. It made him seem filial and kind, which I liked. He admitted that he enjoyed nights out drinking with his old college buddies. I thought he must be daring and fun. I knew no young people in North Korea who drank.

This was the first of many dates with Geun-soo. Over the following months he would take me for walks in Beiling Park during the day, or to noodle bars, or out to a
noraebang
bar, the Korean version of karaoke, in the evenings. He was harmless, but I soon began to find him glib and uninspiring. I felt no emotional bond.

No matter how hard I challenged him to an interesting discussion, even to the point of provoking him, he seemed unable to offer a firm opinion on anything. We often spent our dates in silence. I got the feeling that when he wasn’t seeing me he spent his days playing video games. He also had such a devotion to his mother that I began to dread meeting her. He seemed content for her to decide everything for him.

Geun-soo knew that I was North Korean, but believed my name was Chae Mi-ran. I saw no reason to reveal my real name to him. In fact I was getting so used to being called Mi-ran it felt as if I was shedding the name Min-young like a former skin. I went along with the dating and would occasionally hold Geun-soo’s hand. The relationship wasn’t serious; it was pleasing my uncle and aunt; it helped to keep me distracted as the Western New Year passed again, then my nineteenth birthday, then the Chinese New Year, and to ward off miserable thoughts that it was now well over a year since I’d last seen my mother and Min-ho.

I should have seen the warning lights when Geun-soo began urging me to improve my Mandarin and correcting me on points of etiquette.

When he took me to meet his mother, I was made to feel the significance of the occasion. The family apartment was far larger and more luxurious than my uncle and aunt’s. Mrs Jang greeted me in the hallway. I had never seen such a rich lady. She was elegant and very slim. Her hair was pulled back in a mother-of-pearl barrette; she wore an Hermès scarf around her neck, and beautiful Japanese pearl jewellery.

‘Welcome, Mi-ran,’ she said. Her smile was tepid.

I could guess what she was thinking. A North Korean girl was beneath her son. Yet I also knew from Geun-soo that she did not approve of him dating Chinese girls, a cultural prejudice against the Chinese shared by many ethnic Koreans.

Mrs Jang was a pragmatic, calculating woman: she was willing to put her misgivings aside because she thought a North Korean girl would make a compliant and obedient wife. After all, I was an illegal, and hardly in any position to complain. She also knew that I was raised in a culture that revered elders. I would be submissive to her, my mother-in-law. Although her conversation was excruciatingly polite I watched her looking me up and down as if she were inspecting livestock.

Over the next few months, whenever I was taken to Geun-soo’s home, Mrs Jang began to talk about my future with her son. The family would open a new restaurant for him and me to manage together, she said. Not long after that, without anyone asking me what I felt about the idea, she was mentioning marriage. Her son was a little too young to marry, she told me, but out of consideration towards her he wanted to provide her with grandchildren as soon as possible.

I began to feel caught in a gathering wave. Geun-soo had not proposed marriage to me. In fact, I wasn’t even sure how he felt about me. I found it difficult to picture him getting aroused and passionate about anything. Perhaps he became livelier when he went out drinking, but it was clear that he was keeping that side of his life separate from me. He was passive in all his mother’s schemes.

My dates with him started to become stifling. He kept repeating the need to improve my Mandarin, and would correct me often. His main concern seemed to be that I should not embarrass his family by making mistakes when I spoke. I felt as if I had been enrolled in a training programme to join his family, without once having given my assent. My situation was becoming deeply awkward because my uncle and aunt saw marriage as the solution to my problem, and to theirs. My five-day visit had already turned into a stay of nearly two years.

One afternoon toward the end of 1999, when I was at Geun-soo’s home, Mrs Jang came home laden with department-store shopping bags and mentioned, quite casually, that she had given my birth details to a fortune-teller, who had recommended a propitious date in the summer for our wedding. And she had found a home for us in a nearby apartment, she said. She would soon start choosing our furniture.

That evening, lying on my bed, I was forced to examine – really, truly examine – whether I had any options. I tried to think calculatingly, like Mrs Jang. Regardless of my feelings about the feckless Geun-soo, I asked myself whether this marriage would help me, or trap me. I knew I had a desire to be a businesswoman, and to travel. But if I were to marry now and have children, I’d have to put any career on hold. On the other hand, my position was precarious. I could not stay at my uncle and aunt’s much longer. I had no prospects, least of all of becoming a businesswoman. The alternative was a life on the run.

And if I’m caught?

Arrest, repatriation, beatings, prison camp. The ruin of my family’s
songbun.
A spasm of terror ran through me.

No matter which way I looked at it, I had no choice.

So I tried hard to convince myself.
Geun-soo’s all right. A girl could do a lot worse. If I married him I’d have a comfortable life without fear, and a Chinese ID.
I spent weeks thinking these thoughts, arguing in silence with myself.

There was just one problem, however, and it was a major one. I wasn’t choosing any of this. It was all happening to me.

Through connections, Geun-soo’s family obtained a new identity for me. He even showed me the ID card and let me hold it. I recognized my face, but not the name. It was a new name, another one I had not chosen. I was to be a Korean-Chinese called Jang Soon-hyang. As I was too young to marry – the legal marriage age in China is twenty – they’d made me older.

‘You’ll get it after the wedding,’ Geun-soo said with a smirk, and picked it out of my hands. Even he could tell I was having misgivings – more so when I learned that my new name meant ‘the person who respects elders, and makes a good wife by following her husband and listening really well to him’.

The millennium passed, then another birthday. My uncle gave me a Motorola cellphone as a present, so that I could chat with Geun-soo whenever I liked, he said. The wedding plans gathered pace.

Mrs Jang sensed that I was feeling pressured by her will. She tried to reassure me. ‘After you’re married, we’ll take care of you,’ she said, squeezing my hand with her bony fingers and rings. ‘You won’t have to worry about a thing.’

It was kind of her to say that. It emboldened me to ask the question I wanted to ask. I don’t know why I thought I had to ask her permission.

‘When I’m married would it be all right to visit my family?’

I thought my new Chinese ID would mean I could visit North Korea legally.

We were sitting around the kitchen table at her home. Mrs Jang and Geun-soo’s two sisters stared at me in horror.

‘Oh, no, no, no,’ she said, as if there’d been some gross misunderstanding. ‘You can never go back. Do you understand?’ Her voice carried an edge of warning. ‘They might find out who you are. Then we’d all be in trouble. We’ve had to break rules to get your ID as it is. In fact, it’s too dangerous even to contact your family again.’

She saw the shock on my face and she gave a thin, quick smile, like a sudden crack in ice.

‘After you marry, you will have a new family. You will join our family.’

When I told Geun-soo what his mother had said, I was still emotional. He knew how badly I wanted to see my mother and Min-ho again. I thought this was his moment – to comfort his future wife, show understanding, tell me we’d find a way to achieve it, somehow, and not to worry. Instead he said blandly: ‘My mother’s right. It’s for the best.’ He wasn’t even looking at me. He was playing a video game.

I was stunned. He and my future in-laws were closing down any talk of my seeing my family again. If I even managed to contact them, I would have to keep it secret from those closest to me.

I looked at Geun-soo’s face, pale in the reflected light of the video game, and knew I could not marry this man.

Whatever happened next I would be on my own, but I didn’t care. I would find a way to fly in life. I didn’t know how, but I would take my chances.

My uncle and aunt were talking excitedly about the wedding at almost every mealtime. I could not bear to tell them of my decision, or to witness their disappointment. I was fearful, too, that Mrs Jang might feel so angry and humiliated by the loss of face that she would report me to the authorities as a fugitive. I had no one to talk to. The situation left only one door open.

Escape.

It was the summer of 2000. The wedding was just weeks away. I thought hard about when I would make my move. It was a phone call from Geun-soo that decided the matter for me. He told me that his mother, without asking us, had booked our honeymoon at a luxurious beach resort at Sanya, on the South China Sea.

That did it. I would leave straight away.

I threw some clothes into a bag, and waited until my aunt and uncle had left for work. I took the elevator down to the lobby and smiled at the caretaker. The blood was rushing to my temples. A memory flashed across my mind of my foot stepping onto the ice of the Yalu River. I walked calmly out of the apartment building, took the chip out of my cellphone, and dropped it in a trash can.

The cab driver’s eyes regarded me in the mirror, waiting for me to say where to go. I was in an agony of hesitation. I had no plan. For the first time in my life I had no one to turn to.

Shenyang is a vast metropolis. I could go anywhere, but my gut feeling told me to stay away from the district known as Xita, or West Pagoda. This was Shenyang’s Koreatown, where most of the city’s ethnic Koreans lived and ran businesses. If anyone searched for me, it would be there. I told the driver to head to a district I did not know, on the opposite side of the city, where no one would find me. I would have to speak Mandarin, but after two years of study, my ability was adequate. I felt I could handle things.

But once we were on the freeway and passing through unfamiliar districts, I was again filled with doubts.

Although it was risky, the best chance of finding a job and someone to help me would be in Xita, among Koreans. I had been there several times with my aunt and remembered seeing an informal job market where people hung about, waiting to be offered a casual day’s work. And I needed to find work, fast. My uncle had been giving me some modest living expenses, but I had only saved enough to last me a couple of days. I told the driver to change direction and head to Xita.

Among the crowd of jobseekers I didn’t know whether to appear eager or nonchalant. I’d been standing there only a few minutes when a woman approached me and spoke in Mandarin.

‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘Are you looking for a job?’

She was middle-aged, but with very girlish makeup, and a cotton dress that showed bare shoulders.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m the manager of a hair salon and need another stylist. Are you interested?’ Her voice was girlish too. ‘You’ll be trained. And the lodgings are free.’

I could not believe my luck.

‘It’s on the edge of the city. We can go by cab. It’ll take about thirty minutes.’

Her name was Miss Ma. On the way there, she asked me many questions. I felt she was trying to befriend me. I told her I was from Shenyang and that my ‘father’ owned a trading company that did business with South Korea. She expressed surprise that a girl from such a family would want a job in a hair salon. I tried to give the impression I was rebelling.

I noticed that Miss Ma’s nails were painted a cyclamen purple, which I thought rather far out for a woman her age, and she wore a thin gold trace chain around her ankle.

We arrived at a drab suburb of shops and apartments. It looked more like Changbai than Shenyang. The hair salon was unlike any beauty parlour I had known. The left side was lined with black leather sofas and on the right were a half-dozen barber’s chairs facing large mirrors. Two of the chairs were occupied by middle-aged men having their hair shampooed.

This is a men’s hair salon?

Another man of about fifty was sprawled on one of the sofas reading a newspaper and smoking. He tapped his ash into a paper cup. I noticed something peeping above his shirt collar: the blue head of a serpent tattooed on his neck. Miss Ma greeted him and his eyes followed me without smiling. Without my needing to be told I knew this man was the boss.

Miss Ma led me down into the basement and pointed out six small ‘therapy’ rooms with smoked-glass doors. She told me this was where I would be working. Her tone was less friendly now. There was a stale yellow light. It smelled of damp and male sweat. She opened the door to one of the rooms, and I heard myself gasp.

Inside, lit only by a tea light, a young woman in a skimpy slip was sitting beside a man lying on a futon on his stomach. He was naked but for a white towel around his waist. Coming from prudish North Korea, I had never been in an environment where men and women mingled naked, let alone touched each other. She was massaging one of his arms.