I don’t know what my father thought when he met my mother, but she must have been a beautiful sight. She was slender, with strong limbs, high cheekbones, and fine, pale features. She also had a quick mind and a powerful will, which must have fascinated him.
She was not that impressed with him. To her he was ordinary looking, and not very tall. But her brother Min Sik had told her that his friend was capable enough to take care of a wife. There’s a saying for men like my father: “He could survive even on bare rock,” meaning he was resourceful and resilient no matter what the circumstance.
According to tradition, their marriage was arranged by their families.
My grandfather Park accompanied my father on a selling trip to Kowon. They had decided that it was safer to spread the risk between the two of them, so that neither would be carrying too many cigarettes or too much money if they were searched. When they arrived safely, they stayed with Min Sik and his family.
Grandfather Park quickly noticed my mother, and saw her exchanging significant looks with his son. He sat down with my mother’s mother to discuss a match. My parents were judged by their families to be well suited; they both had bad songbun. As we say, you have to match swallow with swallow, magpie with magpie. In this case, bride and groom were both magpies. When the deal was done, Jin Sik and Keum Sook were told they were engaged. End of story.
The wedding celebration was nothing special. My mother wore her traditional hanbok, and my father came to her parents’ house, where there was a big table of food laid out for close family and friends. Then, my mother rode the train to Hyesan for a similar gathering at my father’s house. There was no ceremony. My parents just brought their ID cards to the police station to record their marriage, and that was it.
There is another Korean saying: “The thread follows the needle.” Usually the man is the needle and the thread is the woman, so the woman follows the husband to his home. But she does not take his name. For many women, it is the only independence that remains in their lives.
Four
Tears of Blood
My parents prospered in the early years of their marriage. They moved into a small house by the railroad station that the military had given to my grandfather after he retired. It was very run-down, but my father started fixing it up for his growing family. My mother became pregnant with my sister, Eunmi, almost right away, and she was born in January 1991.
My father left the metal foundry to find other jobs that gave him more freedom to be away from the office for days at a time to run his businesses. In addition to the cigarettes, he bought sugar, rice, and other goods in the informal markets in Hyesan, then traveled around the country selling them for a profit. When he did business in Wonsan, a port on the East Sea, he brought back dried sand eels—tiny, skinny fish that Koreans love to eat as a side dish. He could sell them for a good profit in our landlocked province, and they became his best-selling product.
Because my mother had spent her whole life in the center of the country, far away from any outside influences, she didn’t know anything about the black market. She didn’t even understand the concept of business. This all changed during the 1990s, when the famine and an economic collapse turned the whole country into a nation of traders in order to survive. But before that, capitalism was something dirty to North Koreans, and money was too disgusting for most people to mention in polite conversation.
Now she was married to a businessman who made his living handling money. It took some getting used to. But like many loyal North Koreans, she was able to separate her ideology from her actions and not see that there was much of a conflict. She became a skilled trader herself. It may have felt unnatural to her at first, but she came to recognize that my father was more aware and competent than other people and she followed his lead. Soon after they were married, she began helping him buy and sell his products in both the legal and underground markets in Hyesan.
Even though my parents were better off than most of their neighbors, they were never members of the so-called elite. That kind of wealth came only from high-level government connections. However, they did well enough to take a vacation trip to North Korea’s monument-filled capital, Pyongyang, when Eunmi was an infant, and my mother was able to dress in some of the fashionable clothes that were smuggled in from China. She loved designer handbags (even if they were Chinese knockoffs), Japanese blouses, and nice cosmetics. Years later, after our escape, I would joke that she was like the Paris Hilton of North Korea. But she was never extravagant; she just had a great sense of style.
Despite her good fortune, my mother never stopped working, and nothing was too difficult for her. She was chopping firewood for the house late into her pregnancy with Eunmi. The doctors said that’s why she went into labor early and had her first baby in her eighth month. We think I was even more premature because, in her seventh month, my mother was hauling coal across a railroad bridge in Hyesan.
The coal transport was part of a backdoor enterprise run by my grandfather Park. After he lost his job at the commissary, my grandfather found work as a security guard at a military facility in Hyesan. The building had a stockpile of coal in one storage area, and he would let my parents in to steal it. They had to sneak in at night and carry the coal on their backs through the darkened city. It was hard work and they had to move fast, because if they were caught by the wrong policeman—meaning one they couldn’t bribe—they might end up getting arrested. One night on that bridge my mother felt sharp pains in her abdomen, and the next day she delivered a baby the size of a young chicken: me.
According to North Korea, my grandfather Park and my parents were criminals. My father bought and sold goods for a profit; in other countries he’d simply be called a businessman. He bribed officials—whose salaries weren’t enough to feed their families—in order to travel freely in his own country. And while it’s true that my grandfather and my parents stole from the government, the government stole everything from its people, including their freedom.
As it turns out, my family’s business was simply ahead of its time. By the time I was born, in 1993, corruption, bribery, theft, and even market capitalism were becoming a way of life in North Korea as the centralized economy fell apart. The only thing left unchanged when the crisis was over was the regime’s brutal, totalitarian grip on political power.
• • •
Throughout my childhood, my parents knew that with each passing month it was getting harder and harder to survive in North Korea, but they didn’t know why. Foreign media were completely banned in the country, and the newspapers reported only good news about the regime—or blamed all of our hardships on evil plots by our enemies. The truth was that outside our sealed borders, the Communist superpowers that created North Korea were cutting off its lifeline. The big decline started in 1990 when the Soviet Union was breaking apart and Moscow dropped its “friendly rates” for exports to North Korea. Without subsidized fuel and other commodities, the economy creaked to a halt. There was no way for the government to keep the domestic fertilizer factories running, and no fuel for trucks to deliver imported fertilizer to farms. Crop yields dropped sharply. At the same time, Russia almost completely cut off food aid. China helped out for a few years, but it was also going through big changes and increasing its economic ties with capitalist countries—like South Korea and the United States—so it, too, cut off some of its subsidies and started demanding hard currency for exports. North Korea had already defaulted on its bank loans, so it couldn’t borrow a penny.
By the time Kim Il Sung died in 1994, famine was already taking hold in the northern provinces. Government rations had been cut sharply, and sometimes they failed to arrive at all.
Instead of changing its policies and reforming its programs, North Korea responded by ignoring the crisis. Instead of opening the country to full international assistance and investment, the regime told the people to eat only two meals a day to preserve our food r
esources. In his New Year’s message of 1995, the new Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, called on the Korean people to work harder. Although 1994 had brought us “tears of blood,” he wrote, we should greet 1995 “energetically, single-mindedly, and with one purpose”—to make the motherland more prosperous.
Unfortunately, our problems could not be fixed with tears and sweat, and the economy went into total collapse after torrential rains caused terrible flooding that wiped out most of the rice harvest. Kim Jong Il described our national struggle against famine as “The Arduous March,” resurrecting the phrase used to describe the hardships his father’s generation had faced fighting against the Japanese imperialists. Meanwhile as many as a million North Koreans died from starvation or disease during the worst years of the famine.
The economic collapse disrupted every level of North Korean society. While it had once provided for all our needs, now the regime said it was up to us to save ourselves. When foreign food aid finally started pouring into the country to help famine victims, the government diverted most of it to the military, whose needs always came first. What food did get through to local authorities for distribution quickly ended up being sold on the black market. Suddenly almost everybody in North Korea had to learn to trade or risk starving to death. And the regime realized it had no choice but to tolerate these unofficial markets. In fact, Kim Jong Il eventually allowed permanent, state-managed marketplaces to be built.
The new reality spelled disaster for my father. Now that everyone was buying and selling in the markets, called jangmadangs, there was too much competition for him to make a living. Meanwhile, penalties for black market activities grew harsher. As hard as my parents tried to adapt, they were having trouble selling their goods and were falling deeper into debt. My father tried different kinds of businesses. My mother and her friends had an ancient pedal sewing machine they used to patch together pieces of old clothes to make children’s clothing. My mother dressed my sister and me in these outfits; her friends sold the rest in the market.
Some people had relatives in China, and they could apply for permits to visit them. My uncle Park Jin did this at least once, but my father didn’t because the authorities frowned on it and would have paid closer attention to his business. Those who went almost always came back across the border with things to sell in makeshift stalls on the edges of the jangmadang. They told us about the amazing items you could find in the trash in China, even perfectly good clothes. Nothing went to waste in North Korea, and we couldn’t imagine throwing anything out that could be used again, even empty plastic bottles, bags, and tin cans. Those were like gold to us.
When you are a very small child, all you know is what is in front of your eyes. Your whole life is your parents, your relatives, your neighborhood. It seemed normal to me that there were times when we had food to eat, and other times when there was only one meal a day and we went hungry.
While they worked to keep us from catastrophe, my parents often had to leave my sister and me alone. If she couldn’t find someone to look after us, my mother would have to bolt a metal bar across the door to keep us safe in the house. Sometimes she was away for so long that the sun went down and the house would get dark. My sister, who was afraid of the dark, would cry. I’d say, “Sister, don’t cry. Umma will be here soon.” But after a while, I would lose my nerve and we’d cry together. When we heard her voice at the door, we would run to it, sobbing with relief. It was so hard for my mother to come home and find us like that. But if she had some food, all would be forgotten.
In the free world, children dream about what they want to be when they grow up and how they can use their talents. When I was four and five years old, my only adult ambition was to buy as much bread as I liked and eat all of it. When you are always hungry, all you think about is food. I couldn’t understand why my mother would come home with some money and have to save most of it for later. Instead of bread, we would eat only a little bit of porridge or potatoes. My sister and I agreed that if we ever became adults, we would use our money to eat bread until we were full. We would even argue about how much we could eat. She told me she could eat one bucket of bread; I said I could eat ten. She would say ten, I would say one hundred! I thought I could eat a mountain of bread and I would never be filled up.
The worst times were the winters. There was no running water and the river was frozen. There was one pump in town where you could collect fresh water, but you had to line up for hours to fill your bucket. One day when I was about five years old, my mother had to go off to do some business, so she took me there at six in the morning, when it was still dark, to wait in line for her. I stood outside all day in the freezing cold, and by the time she came back for me, it was dark again. I can remember how cold my hands were, and I can still see the bucket and the long line of people in front of me. She has apologized to me for doing that, but I don’t blame her for anything; it was what she had to do. For my mother it’s still a painful story that lives deep, deep inside her. She carries guilt to this day that she was not better able to enjoy my childhood; she was too busy worrying about getting us enough food to eat.
Despite North Korea’s anticapitalist ideals, there were lots of private lenders who got rich by loaning money for monthly interest. My parents borrowed from some of them to keep their business going, but after black market prices collapsed and a lot of their merchandise was confiscated or stolen, they couldn’t pay it back. Every night, the people who wanted to collect their debts came to the house while we were eating our meal. They yelled and made threats. Finally, my father decided he couldn’t take it anymore. He knew of another way to make money, but it was very dangerous. He had a connection in Pyongyang who could get him some valuable metals—like gold, silver, copper, nickel, and cobalt—that he could sell to the Chinese for a profit.
My mother was against it. When he was selling sand eels and cigarettes, the worst that could happen was that he might have to spend all his profits on bribes, or do a short time in a reeducation camp. “You can live with that,” she told him. “But smuggling stolen metals could get you killed.” She was even more frightened when she learned how he intended to bring the contraband to Hyesan. Every passenger train in North Korea had a special cargo car attached at the end of it called Freight Train #9. These #9 trains were exclusively for the use of Kim Jong Il to bring him specialty foods, fruits, and precious materials from different parts of North Korea, and to distribute gifts and necessity items to cadres and party officials around the country. Everything shipped in the special car was sealed in wooden crates that even the police couldn’t open to inspect. Nobody could even enter the car without being searched. My father knew somebody who worked on the train, and that man agreed to help smuggle the metals from Pyongyang to Hyesan in one of these safe compartments.
My mother held out for a long time, and then she finally agreed to the plan. It was the only way to survive.
Five
The Dear Leader
Between 1998 and 2002, my father spent most of his time in Pyongyang running the smuggling business. Usually he would be gone for nine months of the year, coming back only for infrequent, short visits when he rode the train to Hyesan along with his latest shipment of metal. My mother quickly learned to run the business in Hyesan, picking up packages from the train and delivering them to the smugglers who sold them across the border in China.
When my father suffered a setback in his business, we would be poor and hungry again, but most of the time things were getting better for us. When he was in town, my father entertained at our house to keep the local officials happy, including the party bosses he paid to ignore his absences from his “official” workplace. My mother cooked big meals of rice and kimchi, grilled meat called bulgogi, and other special dishes, while my father filled everyone’s glasses to the brim with rice vodka and imported liquor. My father was a captivating storyteller with a great sense of humor. I fell asleep listening to the sound of his voice and roars o
f laughter from the men at the table.
I was just happy when there was food to eat, and we could afford new shoes and uniforms for school.
• • •
I was the smallest kid in my first-grade class, and definitely not the smartest. I know this because in North Korea they line you up by your height, and seat you in class by your test scores. I had trouble learning how to read and write and needed special help. I hated being at the bottom of the class, and sometimes just refused to go to school.
I had a headstrong personality, perhaps because I had to work so hard for everything I achieved. I was determined to learn how to read, so I struggled to make sense of all those characters swimming across the page.
When my father was home, he would sometimes hold me in his lap and read me children’s books. I loved stories, but the only books available in North Korea were published by the government and had political themes. Instead of scary fairy tales, we had stories set in a filthy and disgusting place called South Korea, where homeless children went barefoot and begged in the streets. It never occurred to me until after I arrived in Seoul that those books were really describing life in North Korea. But we couldn’t see past the propaganda.
When I finally learned to read by myself, I couldn’t get enough books to satisfy me. Again, most of them were about our Leaders and how they worked so hard and sacrificed so much for the people. One of my favorites was a biography of Kim Il Sung. It described how he suffered as a young man while fighting the Japanese imperialists, surviving by eating frogs and sleeping in the snow.