After the doctors examined me, they decided that my appendix had to come out. Because of my father’s experience as a young man, my parents believed it was the only way to save my life. Even though we were supposed to have free medical care, the doctors expected us to pay them for the surgery. It sounds harsh, but the government gave them almost nothing, and bribery was the only way for them to survive. Somehow my parents persuaded the doctors to perform the operation if we supplied them with the anesthetic and antibiotics they needed. My mother went back to our old neighborhood and borrowed 20,000 won (about enough to buy fifty pounds of rice) from Kim Jong Ae, the kind woman who had lived next door to us, then used the money to buy the drugs on the black market.
When the doctors opened my stomach, they discovered it wasn’t my appendix after all, just badly inflamed intestines. They removed my appendix anyway, gave me a strong antibiotic, and began to close me up. But the small amount of anesthetic they gave me did not last long enough, and I woke up before the surgery was finished. I can’t even describe the pain. They had to hold me down because I was screaming so much. I thought I would lose my mind, but they finished the surgery anyway. Later my mother brought me some painkillers and I finally passed out.
The next thing I remember I was in a hospital room, with my mother sitting next to me. The beds were all full, so they put me on a pallet on the floor. She was stroking my hand, and after a while I noticed there was a ring on my finger. It was gold colored with little glass jewels on the top.
“Where did this come from, Umma?” I asked groggily.
“Chun Guen was here when you were sleeping,” she said. He had brought me some snacks and juice and the ring to surprise me after my operation. But I would not wake up. She said he held my hand for a while, then put the ring on my finger before he left.
Later he came back to check on me, and the first thing he did was look at my hand.
“It makes me happy to see you wearing that ring, Yeonmi-ya,” he said.
I did my best to smile, and showed him how loose it was on my finger. “It’s too big,” I said.
“Then you’ll have to get better and gain some weight.”
He came back to visit me almost every day while I recovered, and I was always so happy to see him.
My mother remained at my bedside. Because we had no money to bribe them, the nurses ignored me. My mother had to do everything, from keeping my incision clean to giving me whatever food she could find. The hospital was poorly equipped and filthy. To use the bathroom I had to get up and cross an open courtyard to reach the outhouse. At first I was too weak to stand. But once I was well enough to walk to the bathroom, I discovered that the hospital used the courtyard to store the dead. The whole time I was staying there, several bodies were stacked like wood between my room and the outhouse. Even more horrible were the rats that feasted on them day and night. It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. The first thing the rats eat are the eyes, because that is the softest part of a body. I can still see those hollow red eyes. They come to me in my nightmares and I wake up screaming.
My mother couldn’t believe the hospital just left the bodies out there in the open.
“Why can’t you take these people away and bury them!” she demanded when a nurse walked by.
The nurse shrugged. “The government won’t come and collect the bodies until there are seven of them. That’s only five,” she said, then walked away.
My mother had fought to hold on to her belief that she lived in a good country. She was shocked and saddened to realize how corrupt and pitiless North Korea had become. Now she was even more convinced that she couldn’t let her daughters grow up in such a place. We had to get out as soon as possible.
The doctors told us I had to stay in that hellish hospital for seven days before they could remove my stitches. By now it was nearly the end of March, and time was running out to cross the frozen river. But I was still too weak to travel.
On March 25, the day before I was due to be released, my sister came to visit the hospital while my mother was with me. She told us she couldn’t wait anymore, so she had found a broker to take her to China. She was sixteen years old now, and starting to make her own decisions. Even though my mother pulled her aside and begged her to wait for me, Eunmi said, “No, I’m leaving tonight with my friend’s sister. If I don’t take this opportunity, there may not be another.” To my mother, she acted like this trip to China was not such a big deal, that she would just visit a neighborhood on the other side and maybe come right back. My mother didn’t think this sounded right, but she couldn’t persuade her to stay.
Later that night, Eunmi showed up at the hospital again. “We couldn’t go tonight,” she said.
“See, it’s not so easy to escape!” my mother said.
“You wait,” said my sister. “We’ve made another appointment to go tomorrow night.”
Eleven
Missing
The next day, my uncle borrowed a car to take me home from the hospital. My family was hoping the doctors would remove my stitches and release me, but they refused because we still owed them money. So I had to stay another night.
My sister dropped by later with her friend. Eunmi was dressed in thin black clothes, and her hair was tied back. When we told her that I still could not leave, she whispered to my mother, so the other patients couldn’t hear, “I’m sorry. I’m going tonight.”
My mother didn’t believe she would make it on her own. She just said, “Yeah, okay. You’ll be back.” She didn’t hug her or even say good-bye. It was something she would regret for many years. I still cry when I think about that night. We didn’t know how desperate Eunmi was. My father had made me a special dish in which you scoop out a potato and fry it with oil and spices. It was a rare and expensive treat, but he was worried because I was so skinny and had not eaten anything solid for many days. So he made me this special meal and gave it to Eunmi to bring to me. But I was feeling too sick to eat that night.
“I’m just not hungry, sister,” I said.
“Do you mind if I eat it, then?”
“No, please do,” I said.
At that she sat down next to me and stuffed the potato cake into her mouth so fast it looked like somebody was trying to steal the food from her.
“That was delicious,” she said a few seconds later. “Please don’t tell Father I ate it!”
“I promise.”
It’s still so painful to think about that time. That’s all any of us wanted: just to eat.
My mother stayed with me that night. When Eunmi did not return as before, we assumed she had just gone home to the apartment. But at five o’clock in the morning my father walked into my room and he was shaking.
“Where’s Eunmi?” he said. “Is she here?”
“No!” said my mother. “She’s not with you?”
“No,” he said. “She never came home.”
Eunmi was gone. My mother never thought she would go through with her plan alone, and now she blamed herself. She was so upset she could hardly catch her breath. My father was wringing his hands. What if Eunmi had fallen into the icy water and drowned? What if they never found her body? My parents told me they had to search for my sister immediately, so I had to check out of the hospital right away. They found the doctors and pleaded with them until they finally took out my stitches.
I was still too weak to walk, but Chun Guen had come by the night before and offered to pick me up if I was released. I was so happy when he brought a friend with a motorcycle. The friend waited outside and we were alone for a while in the hospital room. Chun Guen finally admitted that he knew all about my family. Some jealous girls who lived in his building found out he was visiting me in the hospital, and told him everything about my father’s being a criminal. But Chun Guen said he didn’t care. He still wanted me to marry him. He was such an optimistic person, and so confident th
at he would make me the happiest person in the world. I told him nothing, and just smiled. That seemed to be enough for him. Somehow in my desperation he was willing to offer me a little bit of warmth, light, and hope. I will always be grateful for that.
We walked out of the hospital together and his friend started up the motorcycle. Chun Guen held on to me tightly as his friend drove slowly all the way to my building. I couldn’t make it up the stairs, so Chun Guen carried me up eight flights to my apartment. He was very gallant for the first few floors, then he started sweating.
“You seem to be gaining weight!” he said with a grin.
I just smiled because it hurt too much to laugh.
When we got to my door, I was still too ashamed to let him inside, where he could see how poorly we lived. So we said our good-byes, and he was gone.
• • •
When I walked into our room, I found my parents huddled together on the floor. There was no news of Eunmi. My father was rocking back and forth, crying silently. He didn’t dare make a noise because our neighbors would hear and know something was wrong. When they had asked him where Eunmi had gone, he said, “Oh, she’s staying with friends.” They could not know the truth or they would report us. So we waited that night, hoping Eunmi would return, but fearing something terrible had happened to her. All kinds of thoughts went through our heads. Not knowing was the hardest thing.
I was so tired and weak I went right to bed, and that’s when I found a note from Eunmi under my pillow. It said, “Go find this lady. She will bring you to China.” She gave me the address of a house near the river, across from the Wiyeon train station.
The next morning, my parents went to see the family of the girl who had run away with Eunmi. They brought the note with them. Then all of them went to the address Eunmi had left. When a woman came to the door, my mother demanded, “Where is our daughter? Tell me what you’ve done with her!”
The woman shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t know your daughter.”
There was nothing they could do, so they went home.
Days went by and there was still no word from Eunmi. On March 31, my father sent my mother on an errand to do some business. I was still very weak, but I was feeling well enough to walk a little bit, so I went with her. She was planning to stop by Eunmi’s friend’s house on the way, to see if they had heard any news about the girls.
When we arrived at the house, it was like a funeral was going on. Everybody was crying, and the girl’s mother was frantic and sick with grief. “It’s all my fault,” she cried. She said her daughter was hungry all the time and was never satisfied with what her mother gave her to eat. “I told her she ate too much. But if I had known she was going to leave like this, I never would have said it.” She couldn’t stop sobbing, and her husband told her to please calm down. “You’re going to die like this,” he said. Quietly, he told my mother and me that it was better for his daughter to leave. She could not live in this country. And some of the other neighbor women were saying that they would go to China, too, if they had the chance.
After we left the house, my mother came up with another strategy. She was desperate to find out if Eunmi had crossed into China safely. She suggested that I return to the broker’s house alone and tell her that I wanted to go to China. We were hoping the broker would let me in to look around, because for all we knew, my sister could still be inside the house.
When I knocked on the door, the same woman answered. She was in her early forties, like my mother, but she had a baby in her arms who was still nursing. She was dressed very poorly, and when I peeked inside the door, the house looked so run-down it seemed like it might collapse at any moment. When she saw I was alone, she suddenly became very friendly. I told her I wanted to go to China, and she said that could be arranged. Then I called my mother over. The woman blocked the doorway and wouldn’t invite us in, so we stood outside as we spoke. At this point she didn’t admit that she knew my sister, but she seemed more eager to win our trust.
“Just wait here,” she said.
She walked around the corner, then came back a little later and led us to an alley. There she introduced us to a pregnant woman who was also quite friendly.
“If you want, you can cross the river tonight,” the pregnant woman said.
I didn’t know until that very moment how much I wanted to leave North Korea. Even when I first knocked on the door I didn’t know. But right then and there I made up my mind. I was going to China, and my mother was coming with me. Right now. It was not our original plan. My sister and I were supposed to go ahead, without my mother. But now I knew I could not leave my mother behind.
I grabbed my mother’s hands and said, “We must go, Umma! There may never be another chance!” But my mother tried to pull away.
“Yeonmi-ya, I can’t leave your father. He’s sick. You have to go by yourself.”
I held on to her and said, “No, if I let go of your hands, you’re going to die in North Korea. I can’t go if I leave you here!”
She begged me, “Just give me one chance to tell your father that I’m going. Then I’ll come back.”
I wouldn’t let her leave, not even to tell my father. He would find a way to stop her, or she would change her mind. I knew if I let her out of my sight I would never see her again. So I said everything I could to persuade her to go with me now. I told her that we would find Eunmi and could settle in China first, and then we would get Father to come later. I still imagined we could come back any time to wave to my father across the river, just like those Chinese kids who used to ask me if I was hungry. But the most important thing, the only thing that really mattered, was that by tomorrow we wouldn’t have to worry about food anymore. I gave her no choice.
I was still holding my mother’s hands when I said to the pregnant woman, “I’ll go if my mother can come, too.”
“You can both go,” she said.
“What about my sister, Eunmi?” I asked. “Will we find her there?”
“I’m sure of it,” said the woman. “Once you cross the river, all the North Korean people live in the same area so you’ll see her there.”
This made sense to us, because it’s the way North Korea would be organized, with different people assigned to different areas. We never thought to ask why these women were helping us, and why we didn’t have to pay them anything. We didn’t think that something might be wrong. Even though my mother worked in the black market, she trusted people. As North Koreans, we were innocent in a way that I cannot fully explain.
For the rest of the day we kept changing our location, with the pregnant woman making us wait outside different buildings on the outskirts of Hyesan. Finally, in late afternoon, we ducked into a public toilet and were given some very dark, thin clothes and ordered to change. The woman told us these clothes would make us look like the porters who smuggle goods across the river. That would be our story if we got caught. We would just say that we were being paid to pick up packages in China, and we planned to come right back.
Then she disappeared and two young men came out of the house. They led me and my mother down side streets and back alleys on our way out of town. They told us that if we traveled along the road, people would see us and there could be big trouble. So they took us on footpaths through the mountains—what we called those steep foothills where we went to gather wood—on a winding route back to the river. This was less than two weeks after my surgery and I was already exhausted. The boys walked really fast, and after a while I couldn’t bear the pain in my side so I slowed them down a little. At first just the two boys led us along the trails, then another one joined us. He was even younger than the other boys, but he acted like he was the boss. He gave us more instructions about what we should do when we got to China.
“When you cross the river, don’t tell anybody your real age,” he said. “We’ve told t
he people on the other side that you are eighteen and twenty-eight years old. They won’t take you if you’re too young or too old. And don’t let them know you are mother and daughter. They don’t expect that and it will be a problem, too.”
This seemed strange to me, but I had to trust these smugglers to know what was best to get us into China. By that time, we had walked all day, and it was getting dark. We hadn’t had any food since the morning, and they gave us nothing to eat. At some point the first two stopped and told us to follow the youngest one. He led us to the edge of a cliff. It was very dark, but we could see a big road below us, and a steep bank down to the frozen river.
“Follow me,” the boy said. “And whatever you do, don’t make any noise.”
PART TWO
China
Twelve
The Other Side of Darkness
There was no time to rest on the other side of the river. We had made it past the North Korean soldiers, but Chinese patrols could still pick us up at any time and send us back across the border. Our guide told us to keep moving, so my mother and I followed him up the icy bank to a small unlit shack. A bald, heavyset man was waiting for us there.
“Here, give me your clothes and put these on,” he said. We could tell by his rough accent that he must be one of the many Chinese of Korean descent who lived in Chaingbai. In the dark, we took off our clothes and put on another set of cheap Chinese clothes. Now if we were stopped, we might at least look like we belonged there. Our North Korean guide stayed with me while the bald broker pulled my mother around to the side of the building.
“Don’t worry,” the guide told me. “Everything is okay.”
But it did not sound okay. I heard my mother pleading with this man, and then there were terrible noises I had never heard before.