It was a sad time to visit Kowon; because of the famine, so many people were dying. My grandmother took a lot of medicines, some opium for the pains of old age and other pills to help her sleep and forget the suffering around her. One morning before I went out to play, I saw her take lots of her medicine, much more than usual.
“Grandma, why are you taking so much medicine?” I asked.
She was very calm and smiled at me. “Grandma just wants to have a good sleep,” she said. “She needs a good rest.”
Later that afternoon, I heard a terrible sound coming from the house. It was my uncle Jong Sik calling my grandmother’s name. We ran inside and he was shaking her in her bed, wailing, “Wake up! Wake up! Answer me!”
But she was lying there peacefully, and no matter how loud my uncle shouted, she could no longer hear him.
A few months later, my uncle would also be dead. Sometimes I can still hear his voice, screaming for his mother, begging her to wake up. These are some of the things I wish I could forget, but I know I never will.
Six
City of Dreams
By the year 2000, when I turned seven years old, my father’s business was thriving. We had returned to Hyesan after my grandmother’s funeral and, before long, my family was rich—at least by our standards. We ate rice three times a day and meat two or three times a month. We had money for medical emergencies, new shoes, and things like shampoo and toothpaste that were beyond the means of ordinary North Koreans. We still didn’t have a telephone, car, or motorbike, but our lives seemed very luxurious to our friends and neighbors.
My father came back from his business trips with loads of gifts for us. He brought my sister and me new clothes and books; my mother would get perfume and face powder. But his most exciting black market purchase was a 1980s-era Nintendo set for playing video games.
My favorite was Super Mario Bros. Whenever the electricity was on, I sat for hours moving the little characters across the screen to bouncy, happy music that still makes me smile when I hear it. My parents loved playing video tennis games, and they could be quite competitive. It was fun to watch them act like kids with the controls in their hands, shouting playful insults at each other. They were also obsessed with professional wrestling videos, which they would watch together in the darkened room after my sister and I had gone to bed. We could hear both of them yelling, “Hit him harder!” My mother’s favorite was a huge blond woman wrestler who defeated all her rivals. But I didn’t like watching these videos because of all the violence. We had enough of that on the streets and at home.
• • •
My parents had a complicated and passionate marriage. They respected each other and were great partners. They made each other laugh. When my father was sober, he treated my mother like gold. But when he was drinking, it was a different story.
North Korean society is by its nature tough and violent, and so are relations between men and women. The woman is expected to obey her father and her husband; males always come first in everything. When I was growing up, women could not sit at the same table with men. Many of my neighbors’ and classmates’ houses had special bowls and spoons for their fathers. It was commonplace for a husband to beat his wife. We had one neighbor whose husband was so brutal that she couldn’t click her chopsticks while she ate for fear he would hit her for making noise.
By comparison, my father was an enlightened man. He included my mother and my sister and me at the table; he respected us. He drank only occasionally and rarely beat my mother. But sometimes he did. I am not excusing his actions, but I am explaining the culture—men in North Korea were taught they were superior, just as they were taught to obey our Leader.
The difference in our household was that my mother wouldn’t take it. Unlike many North Korean women, who would cry and apologize, my mother hit back. She had a strong spirit, stronger than my father’s, and he was no match for her. When their fights got out of control, I would run down the street to get the neighbors to break it up. Sometimes I was afraid they would kill each other.
During their worst fights, my mother would sometimes threaten divorce, but they quickly reconciled. It wasn’t until another woman entered my father’s life that my mother almost left for good.
• • •
When my father began his business in Pyongyang, he needed a place to stay and an assistant to help him with his work. His older sister lived in the city and she introduced him to a single woman in her early twenties named Wan Sun. She was available to work as his assistant, plus she lived with her family in a large apartment with an extra room that he could rent. That’s where he stayed for nine months of the year.
As it turned out, theirs was more than just a working relationship, although my father always tried to deny it. Still, it was not unusual for a wealthy or powerful man to take a mistress in North Korea. After a while, Wan Sun fell in love and wanted to marry him. But first she had to get rid of my mother. It was like a plot from a bad South Korean soap opera—and it almost worked.
In August 2001, my mother decided to go to Pyongyang for a few months while my father spent some time with us in Hyesan. Naturally, she stayed in Wan Sun’s apartment while she sold a few products on the black market and bought some metals to sell in Hyesan. What she didn’t know was that Wan Sun was calling my father and telling him that his wife was seeing other men. Unfortunately, he believed these lies, and the next time my mother and father spoke on the telephone he accused her of cheating. She couldn’t understand why he was saying such things. She was so upset and angry that she told him she wanted a divorce.
This time she meant it. Instead of returning to Hyesan, she took the next train to Kowon to visit her brother Min Sik and think about her next move.
When my mother didn’t come home, my father realized his mistake and was very unhappy. He even started drinking every day, which was unusual for him. Then one afternoon, about two weeks after my mother had run away to Kowon, I answered a knock on the door and found an unfamiliar young woman standing outside, dressed in fancy city clothes. This was my first glimpse of Wan Sun. As soon as she found out that my mother had asked for a divorce, she was on the next train to Hyesan. I had no idea what was going on, but it all seemed very strange.
Later that day, it got even stranger when my friend Yong Ja poked her head in the door and asked me to come over to her house to play. When I stepped inside, my mother was waiting there for me. I was so happy to see her again that I ran into her arms.
“Yeonmi-ya! I missed you so much!” she said.
I still had no clue why she had left and then returned without warning, but she later told me what had happened. Her brother had agreed to take her in if she divorced my father—but only if she left her children behind. She couldn’t abandon us, and during her time away from my father, she began to remember all the good things about him. So she had returned to her family to mend things.
“How is your father, Yeonmi?” she asked.
“Right now he is home with a lady from Pyongyang,” I said.
“Stay right here and don’t come back home until I send for you,” she said.
When she reached our house, she found Wan Sun sitting on a floor mat inside, talking to my father. I don’t know whether my father or his girlfriend was more surprised to see my mother standing in the doorway. My mother ran in and kicked Wan Sun right in the butt, yelling, “Get out of my house!” Wan Sun stood up and slapped her, and my father had to hold my mother to keep her from tearing Wan Sun to pieces. My father told Wan Sun she had better go, and my mother slammed the door behind her.
It was the beginning of November, and this skinny girl from Pyongyang wasn’t prepared for the freezing weather. She was wearing a light coat and thin, impractical shoes. Wan Sun stood outside our house like a shivering ghost, whimpering for my father to let her in again.
Meanwhile, my father begged my mother to change her min
d and not divorce him. He still swore to her that nothing was going on between him and his assistant. My mother didn’t know what to believe. But she knew that her family was more important than this woman, so she decided to stay. Wan Sun left on the next train back to Pyongyang.
• • •
If you asked anyone in the North Korean countryside, “What is your dream?” most would answer, “To see Pyongyang in my lifetime.”
I was eight years old when that dream came true for me.
Only the most privileged citizens are allowed to live and work in the nation’s capital. You need special permission even to visit. But Pyongyang is as familiar to ordinary North Koreans as our own backyards because of the hundreds upon hundreds of picture books and propaganda films that celebrate it as the perfect expression of our socialist paradise. To us, it is a mystical shrine with towering monuments and thrilling pageantry—like Red Square, Jerusalem, and Disneyland all in one city.
My father had not been home in a long time, so he invited each of his daughters to visit him for one month in the summer. I went first. The idea of seeing my father and the city of my dreams at the same time was so exciting that I couldn’t sleep for a whole week before he arrived to pick me up. It was especially exciting because 2002 was the first summer that North Korea staged its now-famous Arirang Festival, a massive celebration of the regime’s military and cultural prowess. I could not believe I would actually get to see it all with my own eyes. I told all my neighbors and classmates about my trip. Some parents asked me not to brag in front of their children, because now they were begging to visit Pyongyang, too.
I packed all my best clothes including my Princess T-shirt and my Mary Jane shoes for this special trip. My father and I left on the morning train for Pyongyang. Even though the distance was only about 225 miles, the ride took days, because electricity shortages slowed down the train. My father and I brought food with us and traveled in a sleeper car, but most people had to sleep on hard seats. When the train finally pulled into the Pyongyang station, Wan Sun came to greet us. I still didn’t understand what the trouble was all about when she was in Hyesan a few months before, and in fact I hardly remembered her. But I had a child’s sense that something was off about this arrangement as I watched her take my father’s arm. That feeling passed quickly, however, as I was carried away by the spellbinding sights and sounds of Pyongyang.
Everything amazed me. I took my first ride on a public bus that day, and I was astonished that people were also traveling around in an underground subway, and in private cars. I had never seen a taxi before, and my father had to help me pronounce a word for it and explain what it meant. Even crazier was a new kind of drink my father bought for me. It was a very bright color and came in a bottle, but when I drank it, it was not gentle in my mouth—in fact, it was painful, like an electric shock.
“Abuji, I don’t like this,” I told my father as I blinked back tears.
“Come on, now,” he said softly. “Don’t act like a country girl! If you drink more, you’ll like it.” But that fizzy soda scared me so much that I never wanted to try another.
Pyongyang felt like a fairyland to me. Everybody seemed so clean and well dressed. Because of an order by Kim Jong Il, all the women had to wear skirts. In Hyesan, a lot of women ignored the official dress code and wore more practical slacks, but not in this fancy city. To me, the residents seemed more refined, with gentler accents and more polite ways of talking than the tough, guttural language we used in the far north.
In contrast to the crumbling apartment houses, dusty alleys, and sooty rail yards of Hyesan, Pyongyang seemed so new and shiny, with huge buildings and wide, spotless boulevards. You hardly saw anyone begging here, just the street children we called kotjebi, who haunted the markets and train stations in every part of North Korea. The difference in Pyongyang was that whenever the kotjebi asked for food or money, the police officers came and drove them off.
Wherever we went, my father pleaded with me to hold his hand tightly. He was afraid I would get lost because I was always looking up at the giant city all around me. When he took me on a bus ride at night to see the lights of downtown Pyongyang, I nearly lost my mind. The only thing that was ever lit up at night in Hyesan was the Kim Il Sung monument, but here all the important buildings glowed like torches. There were so many propaganda banners, some of them written in neon, saying “Pyongyang, Heart of Korea.” That was impressive enough, but even the restaurant signs were neon.
We visited all the sights I had only read about or seen on television: My father showed me the famous Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-story pyramid in the center of the city, designed to be the tallest hotel in the world but never finished. (It’s still not finished.) We posed for a picture in front of the graceful Mansudae fountains on “The Hill of the Sun,” where I laid flowers at the feet of the giant bronze statue of Kim Il Sung. The Great Leader smiled at his people from seventy-five feet above the enormous plaza. He was dressed in a long top coat, with one arm raised as if to reveal the nation’s destiny. My father, always the joker, remarked to Wan Sun, “How cool would it be to take off his big coat and sell it in China?” Then he added, “Or at least one of his shoes.”
My father said the most surprising things. I realize now that he was like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a man who secretly saw past Big Brother’s propaganda and knew how things really worked in the country. But I was still years away from understanding that the Kims weren’t gods. I had a warm, holy feeling being in Pyongyang, where the Great Leader once walked, and where his son, Kim Jong Il, now lived. Just knowing he breathed the same air made me feel so proud and special—which is exactly how I was supposed to feel.
One day we took a two-hour boat ride down the Taedong River to visit Kim Il Sung’s birthplace at Mangyongdae, but changed our minds and instead went to a good Chinese restaurant nearby. I had never been in a restaurant where you sat in chairs. In Hyesan, we could sometimes eat food at the market, and there were a few places like restaurants in people’s houses, but you always sat on the floor. Sitting in a stiff chair seemed very odd to me—and I will still always sit on the floor if I have a choice. But I really liked ordering all kinds of food from a waitress and having someone put it in front of me. For the first time, I ate bread that was soft and delicate instead of black and hard. I finally got to taste those oily noodles I had smelled cooking across the river in China, but I was not used to the flavor. I didn’t say anything, but I almost wished I’d had some kimchi instead. But I ate thinly sliced pork and some other delicious Chinese dishes that were like heaven on earth. In the future, whenever I was hungry, I would eat this meal a thousand times over in my mind. My only regret was that I didn’t order more food.
• • •
Wan Sun’s apartment was on the eleventh floor of a high-rise apartment building in the Songyo district in eastern Pyongyang. I took the first elevator ride of my life in that building. I had seen these things in movies and South Korean soap operas, but the actual experience was more scary than exciting. The electricity in the building worked, but they kept the lights off in the hallways and elevator to save power. So I just held tightly to my father’s hand while we felt our way through the lobby and up to the apartment.
Once inside, there were lots of windows and lights to see everything, There were three bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, and a big dining area. Wan Sun’s father and stepmother slept in one bedroom, Wan Sun stayed with her two younger sisters in a second bedroom, and I slept with my father in the third. At least that’s how it was while I was visiting. As soon as we arrived at the apartment, my father stretched out on his bed after the long train ride. Wan Sun sat down right next to him and leaned against him. It made me uncomfortable, because that’s what I had seen my mother and father do. So I crawled in between them and snuggled up to my father.
Just about every morning we woke up to the sound of the national anthem blaring on the government-supp
lied radio. Every household in North Korea had to have one, and you could never turn it off. It was tuned to only one station, and that’s how the government could control you even when you were in your own home. In the morning it played lots of enthusiastic songs with titles like “Strong and Prosperous Nation,” reminding us how lucky we were to celebrate our proud socialist life. I was surprised that the radio was on so much in Pyongyang. Back home, the electricity was usually off, so we had to wake ourselves up.
At seven in the morning, there was always a lady knocking on the door of the apartment in Pyongyang, yelling, “Get up! Time to clean!” She was head of the inminban, or “people’s unit,” that included every apartment in our part of the building. In North Korea, everybody is required to wake up early and spend an hour sweeping and scrubbing the hallways, or tending the area outside their houses. Communal labor is how we keep up our revolutionary spirit and work together as one people. The regime wants us to be like cells in a single organism, where no unit can exist without the others. We have to do everything at the same time, always. So at noon, when the radio goes “beeeep,” everybody stops to eat lunch. There is no getting away from it.
After the people of Pyongyang finish cleaning in the morning, they line up for the buses and go off to work. In the northern provinces, not many people were going to work anymore because there was nothing left to do. The factories and mines had stopped operating and there was nothing to manufacture. Even if the men went to their offices or assembly lines they would just drink, play cards, and gamble. But Pyongyang was different. Everybody seemed busy. One time Wan Sun’s little sister took me to visit the factory where she worked, a place where they made plastic for car tires. It was the only factory I saw in North Korea that actually functioned.