The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (21 page)

There was a fumbling sound as she handed over the phone.

‘Hello?’ a voice said.

I held my breath.
Who is this?

‘Nuna, it’s me,’ the voice said, using the Korean word a boy uses for an older sister. Something was wrong. It sounded nothing like Min-ho. I turned to the window. I was picturing my brother in the reflection of the glass. When I’d last seen him he was a boy of ten. Now he was fourteen. ‘Nuna, trust me,’ the voice said. ‘Do you remember the time I sneaked over here in the school vacation and couldn’t get back because the river flooded?’

Finally I exhaled.
It’s him.
I began to giggle stupidly and cry at the same time. I felt such a surge of love for him.

‘Your voice is so changed,’ was all I could manage to say.

‘So is yours.’

On the way to the train station I withdrew all my savings and converted it into US dollars. It came to about $800. Some of this I would use to pay to Mrs Ahn’s smuggler as a fee; the rest I would give to my brother and mother. I thought dollars would be handier for them to use as bribes in North Korea. I took the train from Shenyang to Changchun, then the bus to Changbai. It was expensive, but much quicker.

On the fast, silent train, watching the hills slip by, my mind was filling with elated thoughts of seeing Min-ho, when my phone rang again.

A man’s voice said: ‘My men have found your family.’ It was the Chinese broker. That took the smile off my face.

I had almost forgotten about Plan B.

It seemed the most absurd bad luck that both channels had worked and I would now have to pay for both.

‘When will you come to Changbai?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I lied.

When I arrived at the Ahns’ house, a young man was sitting at Mr Ahn’s bedside. He stood up when he saw me.

Whenever I thought of Min-ho, I saw the smooth-faced kid brother with the cute grin. This young man looked nothing like him. He was taller, and fuller, but I recognized my mother’s face in his. He was staring at me with intense curiosity. Then he gave that grin I remembered, as if to say
See? Not a kid any more
. To him, I appeared very strange. I was wearing tight jeans and had brown highlights in my hair, a style truly alien in North Korea. We studied each other across Mr Ahn’s living room, taking each other in, as if across an expanse of years.

‘It’s really you,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He spoke with a man’s voice.

Then we both laughed at the same time, came together, and I hugged his face to mine. I could not believe I had my brother in my arms.

Before I’d even had a chance to ask about our mother a knock sounded on the front door.

Mrs Ahn opened it. Four men were outside. I knew the moment I saw them that I had trouble.

They were dressed in black jackets and jeans. One of them had face piercings. These were not locals from Changbai. They were from a gang.

‘Are you Soon-hyang?’ one of them called, spotting me behind Mrs Ahn. He had a shaved head. ‘We’re the ones who found your family.’

The Chinese broker hired these thugs?

I stepped outside to face them and tried to keep the alarm out of my voice. ‘I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow,’ I said.

‘No, you have to come with us now,’ the shaven-headed one said. ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.’

Mrs Ahn looked shocked.

I left my phone and my bag, and went with them. Min-ho wanted to come. I told him to stay. I had to handle this.

The men took me to an unfurnished apartment in a block on the other side of Changbai. The shaven-headed one led me into a bare room, and closed the door. He stood so close I could feel his breath, and spoke directly into my face.

‘We found your family. Your mother said your brother had already left to meet you at that old man Ahn’s house. Whether you needed us or not makes no difference to me. We’ve done our part. Now you pay.’

‘How much?’

‘Seventy thousand yuan.’

My blood froze. That was almost $8,500 and many, many times more than I had.

‘I don’t have that kind of money.’

‘Your rich-ass businessman friend in Shenyang is paying,’ he said. ‘The broker was clear about that.’ He handed me a cellphone. ‘Call the businessman. Tell him to transfer the money.’

My heart sank to my stomach. As misunderstandings went, this one couldn’t be bigger.

‘This has nothing to do with the businessman,’ I said. ‘I’m the one who has to pay. He was just being helpful. I hardly know him. I can’t ask him for money.’

‘Then you have a problem.’

‘What problem?’

‘I’ll put it this way. If you don’t pay, we’ll take you back to North Korea.’

Sympathetic people I’d met in China would sometimes express their bewilderment that the Kim dynasty had been tyrannizing North Korea for almost six decades. How does that family get away with it? Just as baffling, how do their subjects go on coping? In truth there is no dividing line between cruel leaders and oppressed citizens. The Kims rule by making everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless. A terrorized Party cadre will terrorize his subordinates, and so on down the chain; a friend will inform on a friend out of fear of punishment for not informing. A nicely brought-up boy will become a guard who kicks to death a girl caught trying to escape to China, because her
songbun
has sunk to the bottom of the heap and she’s worthless and hostile in the eyes of the state. Ordinary people are made persecutors, denouncers, thieves. They use the fear flowing from the top to win some advantage, or to survive. And although he was Chinese, and not from North Korea, I was seeing a prime example in this criminal in front of me, standing inches from my face. He had it in his power to rescue people, to be a hero. Instead he was using the terror of the regime to benefit himself and add to the misery of others. He had me on a cliff edge.
Pay me, or I push.

I said it again. ‘I don’t have that kind of money. If you can reduce the fee, I’ll see what I can do. But if you can’t, there’s nothing I can do.’

I felt utterly resigned. He must have seen it in my eyes, because he left me alone and conferred with the others. The apartment had cheap plaster walls. I could hear most of what was spoken in the next room.

‘If you want money from her, you can’t touch her,’ one of them said.

Shaven-head came back into the room. He said I would have to stay here until a solution was found. He would send to Mr Ahn’s for my bag.

I hoped the neutral look on my face hid my panic. My phone and all my cash were in that bag. I did not want them to get their hands on the cash – or I’d have nothing to give Min-ho and my mother, or to Mrs Ahn for the smuggler’s fee.

I asked Shaven-head if I could use his phone. He told me to talk in front of him so he could hear what I was saying.

I called my own phone’s number but no one at Mr Ahn’s answered it. I called it again. And again. Shaven-head lost interest and went to talk to the others.

Come on. Please. Someone answer.

Min-ho later told me that he and Mr Ahn had heard the phone ring but couldn’t see what to press to answer it. Neither of them had seen a cellphone before. Finally, they figured it out. Min-ho answered.

In a low, urgent voice I told him to leave the wallet in my bag but take out all the cash, pay Mrs Ahn the smuggler’s fee, and go as quickly as he could back across the river to Hyesan.

One of the gang returned with my bag. Min-ho had done as I had asked.

Later that day Shaven-head lowered the gang’s fee to 60,000 yuan ($7,250) and told me not even to think of leaving until it was paid.

There was no lock on the room where they kept me, so they took turns to guard me outside the door, while the others slept in the room connected to the only exit. Escape was impossible.

That evening one of them brought back a takeaway meal of skewered lamb and dumplings. My hope was that if I held out they would continue to lower the fee. I was too ashamed to play the only card I had – calling my uncle and aunt in Shenyang. I thought I would rather face my fate in North Korea. After the disrespect I had shown them, how could I ask them to pay a fortune to a criminal gang?

I played for time, telling Shaven-head I was messaging people, appealing to various contacts to see if I could raise the money.

By the third evening they’d had enough of takeaways and took me to a local restaurant, where I was wedged between two of them in a dining booth. I can’t imagine what other customers thought I was doing with these thugs. The gang knew that an illegal like me wouldn’t try anything stupid, like calling for help. If I did, I’d be in even worse trouble.

From their accents I knew that the one with face piercings was Han Chinese. He scared me the most. Violence crackled about him like static. I tried to avoid his eye. He kept looking at me in a way that made me feel naked. Two of the others were Korean-Chinese. They were more normal in appearance. I gathered that they were from a gang based in Yanji. They also dealt in fake leather goods and amphetamines. They were respectful toward Shaven-head. I couldn’t place his accent. Dandong, maybe.

Later, after they’d closed the door on me in the bare room, they opened beers and toasted each other with shots of
soju
. I heard the constant flick of a lighter and guessed they were smoking a drug. Whatever it was, it wasn’t calming them. The talk became competitive and aggressive, and soon turned ominously coarse. My stomach began to knot.

Then the one with the face piercings reminded them that they had a twenty-one-year-old girl in the next room.

There was silence for a moment. I heard him say: ‘What’s she going to do?’

Please no
.

Until this moment I’d been in that strange calm emergency mode I’d been in at the Xita Road Police Station, keeping my fear under control, as if I wasn’t quite there. Now I was losing it. My breathing became shallow. My body began trembling and refused to stop. If they entered the room now I would start screaming.

I heard movement, as if they were getting up off the floor. I pressed myself into a corner. I would beg and plead.

They were talking again. Face-piercings asked why the hell were they treating me so well. One of the Korean-Chinese said: ‘She’s like our client. If you mess her up we might lose the fee.’

One of the others murmured agreement. Shaven-head remained silent. There was another toast of
soju.
Face-piercings seemed to back down. The conversation moved on.

All night I remained crouched in the corner with my arms around my knees, not daring to move, watching the moon’s progress across the windowpane, silken and faint behind cloud, like a moth cocoon. It was the same moon my mother and Min-ho could see. I told myself that if I stayed in its light I would be safe.

Safe.
I thought of my policeman boyfriend in Shenyang, Sergeant Shin Jin-su. I wondered what he’d do if I asked him for help, if I told him the truth about me. The thought of the shock on his face almost made me smile.

At first light I called my uncle in Shenyang. It was the first time I had spoken to him since fleeing his apartment. My voice was fragile with fear and shame. I asked him to help me. I told him I would devote my life to repaying him.

He said: ‘I’ll do it at once.’ He would transfer the money to the gang’s account.

I tried to thank him but the words choked in my throat. He had my father’s genes, and the same love and generosity my father had shown me.

We had to wait two days for the money to clear. I noticed that the two Korean-Chinese took turns to guard me in the next room, not Face-piercings. They didn’t trust him. I was grateful to them for that.

After almost a week as their prisoner, the gang took me with them to the bank in Changbai, and withdrew the money.

Face-piercings’ eyes shone when he saw the thick wads of red 100-yuan bills in an envelope. He clasped the others by the shoulders and pulled them toward him. ‘Oh, we did well.’

Shaven-head took me to the coach station. Before he left he held out his hand and said: ‘Give me your fucking phone.’

I gave it to him.

When he’d gone, I reached into a hidden pocket in the lining of my long winter coat and retrieved some money I had hidden there in a tight roll. I used it to buy a bus ticket for Shenyang.

On the journey back, I rested my head on the cold glass of the window and stared out at a world of white, an empty dimension. Sixty thousand yuan – a fortune representing ten years’ wages at the restaurant – and a week’s imprisonment with the threat of rape, and all I’d achieved was a three-minute reunion with Min-ho.

But I had made contact with my family. I knew they were alive and not in prison. And they knew that I was alive, and that, somehow, I was fine.

With the stress of my ordeals, not to mention the debt that would take me decades to repay, I fell sick once I got back to my apartment, and developed such painful mouth ulcers I found it hard to eat or drink. I was anxious and paranoid. I wanted to get out of Shenyang. Fast. I had an idea of where I would go, but, thinking of what my mother would do, I visited a fortune-teller for good luck.

‘If you move …’ the lady said, pausing for effect, ‘you should go south, to a warmer place.’

‘Such as Shanghai?’ I did not care that I was prompting her with the response I wanted.

She pronounced her next words with an air of profound wisdom, as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘The best place for you would be Shanghai.’

That was all the confirmation I needed.

I gave notice on my apartment. I quit my job at the restaurant. I was about to call Police Sergeant Shin Jin-su to arrange a final meeting and tell him our relationship was over, but changed my mind. He’d soon figure that out for himself.

Just days into January 2002, I packed everything I had into two light bags, bought a one-way ticket to Shanghai, and boarded the fast train.