• • •
Meanwhile, my sister and I had to drop out of school. Education is supposed to be free in North Korea, but students have to pay for their own supplies and uniforms, and the school expects you to bring gifts of food and other items for the teachers. We no longer had money for these things, so nobody cared if we went to class or not. Besides, Eunmi and I had to spend all of our time just staying alive.
To wash our clothes and dishes we had to walk down to the river and break the ice. Every day or so, one of us had to stand in line for tap water for cooking and drinking. The food our mother left with us never lasted very long, so we were very hungry and skinny.
As our mother predicted, the children in town started mocking us because we were a family of criminals. Everybody was saying my father had destroyed our bright future and left us in a hopeless situation. We put our chins in the air and walked away from these people. But we knew they were telling the truth. Once my father became a prisoner and was kicked out of the Workers’ Party, our destiny was irreversible. There was little hope we would ever be a happy family again.
• • •
After that long, dark winter of hunger in 2002 and 2003, I got a painful rash on my face that cracked and bled when I went out in the sun. I was dizzy most of the time and had a bad stomach. A lot of other children suffered from the same thing, and I later found out we all had pellagra, which is caused by a lack of niacin and other minerals. A starvation diet of mostly corn and no meat will bring on the disease, which can kill you in a few years unless you get better nutrition.
After I escaped to South Korea, I was surprised to hear that the blossoms and green shoots of spring symbolize life and renewal in other parts in the world. In North Korea, spring is the season of death. It is the time of year when our stores of food are gone, but the farms produce nothing to eat because new crops are just being planted. Spring is when most people died of starvation. My sister and I often heard the adults who saw dead bodies on the street make clucking noises and say, “It’s too bad they couldn’t hold on until summer.”
Now when I travel to places like America and England in April and May, I have the luxury of enjoying nature and drinking in the beauty of spring flowers. But I also remember the time when I cursed the bright green hills and wished those flowers were made of bread or candy.
The only good thing about spring was that we didn’t need as much wood to burn, and we could walk to the small mountains outside of town where we could fill our bellies with bugs and wild plants so that the hunger didn’t bite so sharply. Some of the plants even tasted good, like wild clover flowers. Eunmi’s favorite was something we called “cat plant,” which had small, soft green leaves. We also chewed on certain roots without swallowing them, just to feel like we were putting something in our mouths. But one time we chewed on a root that made our tongues swell up so we couldn’t talk for at least an hour. After that we were more careful.
Lots of children like to chase after dragonflies; when I caught them, I ate them.
The boys in our neighborhood had a plastic cigarette lighter, and they taught me how to cook a dragonfly head on an open flame. It gave off an incredible smell like roasted meat, and it tasted delicious. Later in the summer, we roasted cicadas, which were considered a gourmet treat. My sister and I would sometimes spend all day up there in the fields, trying to eat as much as we could before returning to our quiet dark house.
In late August 2003, my mother came back to Hyesan and told us to pack up a few things we would need. Her interrogation was finished, and she couldn’t leave us alone for another winter. Our mother sold our house so that we could have money to move back to her hometown of Kowon. But it was a tricky thing to buy and sell property in North Korea because everything belonged to the state. Because it was illegal, the sale of our house was never recorded and there were no deeds or other papers to sign. My mother and the buyer just made an oral agreement, and trusted that nobody would inform on them.
We were leaving the only home we had ever known.
Eight
A Song for Chosun
My mother dropped us off to stay with her brother, my father’s old friend Min Sik, who lived with his wife and two sons in the family house that now belonged to him. Min Sik had a job driving for a collective car service that provided transportation for local factories. But nobody in North Korea could live on their wages alone. In 2002, an average worker’s salary was about 2,400 won per month, worth about $2 at the unofficial exchange rate. That couldn’t even buy ten pounds of cheap grain, and prices kept going up. My uncle couldn’t afford to feed two more children.
But my mother had money from the house sale, which she used to lease a stall in the market for Min Sik’s wife to help support the family. The government was now regulating the jangmadangs and charging fees for spots in the covered markets—and taking bribes for the best positions. My uncle’s wife started a business selling fish and rice cakes, but it wasn’t very profitable. My mother gave what money was left to her brother to hold, but he ran through it quickly.
Soon after we arrived, my mother’s big sister, Min Hee, came to Kowon to visit her brother. She felt bad when she saw how we were struggling, and when she returned to her village of Songnam-ri deep in the countryside, she took me home with her. Her husband was a retired government official, and their children were grown, so she decided I would not be much of a burden.
My aunt’s house was built in the traditional style, with a thatched roof and wooden beams. In front was a swept clay courtyard, with a round brick chimney and fireplace for outdoor cooking. Aunt Min Hee and her husband were very kind to me, but I was lonely without my sister and my mother and often cried. It took time for me to adapt to country life.
There was rarely electricity in the village, so nobody relied on it, and they lived as they had before the technology even existed. At night we traveled by moonlight or just starlight. A lot of women wore traditional skirts as everyday clothes. The mountains were all around us, with springs so clean and pure you could just dip your hand into one to drink. The fanciest transportation available was an oxcart.
Not many houses had clocks in Songnam-ri, so we would wake up whenever the rooster crowed. Most of the time the roosters were very accurate, but sometimes they were not, so many people’s schedules were messed up when the roosters failed to crow. My aunt had lots of chickens, and it was my job to watch the hens lay their eggs and to make sure the other chickens didn’t eat them and that nobody came by to steal them.
I also had other work washing dishes and hauling wood from the forest, but I didn’t mind at all. Besides, I wasn’t weak from hunger anymore. In fact, I had starved for so long that I couldn’t stop eating. I was like a baby bird: whenever I opened my eyes, my mouth opened at the same time; whenever I closed my eyes, my mouth closed, too. My aunt cooked good and simple food for me, dishes made from corn and potatoes and pepper plants she grew in her garden. She also grew sweet potatoes to sell in the market, but we would keep the leaves for ourselves to eat. They were very nutritious. The pigs ate what we left on our plates. The house also had a vineyard around it and I tasted grapes for the first time. It was like heaven.
I recovered very quickly and gained back the weight I had lost. I even started to grow. I’m not very tall now, but I think that if I’d had enough to eat all my life and didn’t have to carry so many buckets of water on my head, I would be a lot taller!
My aunt’s grown daughter was a doctor who went to medical school in Hamhung. While I was living with my aunt, my cousin was practicing obstetrics and gynecology at Songnam-ri’s hospital. She was also engaged to a local policeman in an arranged marriage. I liked him because he brought home videos to watch that the police had confiscated in raids.
Even though my cousin was supposed to be healing people in the hospital, the government didn’t supply her or any of the doctors with medicines. In the cities, patients can s
ometimes buy their own drugs on the black market, but in the rural areas, that isn’t always possible. In Songnam-ri, the nearest jangmadang was more than five miles away and there was no direct route to get there. People had to walk over a mountain and across a river and a stream—even the oxcart couldn’t make it all the way. This left so many people helpless in emergency situations. The government encouraged everyone to be resourceful, even doctors, as part of the juche policy of self-reliance, so the doctors would make their own traditional medicines to have on hand. My cousin often took me with her into the mountains to search for plants, tree barks, and nuts to use for different treatments. I followed along like a happy puppy, learning what is useful, what is edible, what is poisonous.
The doctors in Songnam-ri had to be farmers, too. They cultivated medicinal plants, and actually grew their own cotton to have a supply of bandages and dressings. But there were always shortages of everything. Even in big city hospitals there is no such thing as “disposable” supplies. Bandages are washed and reused. Nurses go from room to room using the same syringe on every patient. They know this is dangerous, but they have no choice. When I came to South Korea, I was amazed when the doctors threw away the tools they had just used on me.
• • •
Even while I was living there, I couldn’t help feeling a strange nostalgia for the simpler way of life in Songnam-ri. I don’t know how else to explain it, but all these new experiences seemed deeply familiar. Up in the mountains, surrounded by nature, I felt closer to my real self than at any time I have known. In some ways it was like living in ancient Chosun, the long-ago Korean kingdom I had heard about from my little grandmother in Kowon. I think she had the same yearning for a place neither of us had known, that existed only in old songs and dreams.
The year I spent in the country gave me a safe place to rest and heal. But it was not my fate to stay there forever. One day in early 2004, my mother visited with some terrible news. My father had been convicted in a secret trial and sentenced to hard labor at a felony-level prison camp. We thought that he was sentenced to seventeen years, but later found out it was ten. No matter, because hardly anyone survived very long in these places. Everybody knew this, because the regime wanted us to fear these camps. They were places where you are no longer considered a human being. Prisoners in these camps can’t even look directly at the guards, because an animal cannot look a human in the face. They normally aren’t allowed visits from family; they can’t even write letters. Their days are spent in bone-breaking labor with only thin porridge to eat, so they are always weak and hungry. At night the prisoners are crammed into small cells and forced to sleep like packed fish, head to toe. Only the strongest live long enough to serve out their sentences.
A chill washed through my veins when I realized that I might never see my father again. And even if he were to survive, when he got out I would be a grown woman. Would we even know each other?
• • •
My mother wanted us to be together again, so she took me back with her to Kowon and persuaded her brother to let the three of us stay with him. She would earn enough to support us.
My mother, Eunmi, and I moved into a small room attached to the main house. It had a very tiny bed with a wire platform. We put some boards on it, but that made it too hard, and it was still very shaky. So we took it out and slept together on the floor. Outside the door there was a tiny open kitchen under a small roof, where water would drip into pans when it rained. Later my uncle and some of his friends built a wall for us so that we could keep the fire going. We lived there for the next two years.
Kowon was a much smaller city than Hyesan, and the people were much friendlier. There also seemed to be fewer thieves. Hyesan suffered from a lot of crime once the economy collapsed, and we had to hide our property behind locked doors. We dried our clothes inside the house, because anything we left on the line would be taken. People would take everything, even your dogs. In North Korea, people have dogs for two reasons: one is for keeping your home safe, and the other is for food. As in many places in Asia, dog meat is a delicacy where I grew up, although I loved dogs too much to want to eat them. Our dogs had to be chained outside during the day and locked in the house at night or someone would steal them to sell, or cook them for dinner.
Kowon was a little safer, but the people there were also desperately poor. The main difference in Kowon was that everybody still shared with one another the way they had in the old times. In Hyesan, we might make rice cakes and secretly eat them by ourselves, or share only with very close neighbors. But in Kowon, if you had rice cakes, all the neighbors would show up and eat until there was nothing left for you. You had no choice.
My aunt in Kowon was very loyal to the regime and was the head of her inminban. Inminban meetings were held once a week as a way for the state to keep track of everybody’s activities and announce new directives. On Saturdays, we would all meet for propaganda and self-criticism sessions. These were organized around student and work units, with students reporting to their classrooms and workers to their offices.
We began by writing out quotations from Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il, the way people in other parts of the world would copy Bible verses or passages from the Koran. Next you had to write down everything you had done in the previous week. Then it was time to stand up in front of the group to criticize yourself. At a typical session I might begin, “This week, I was too spoiled and not thankful enough for my benevolent Dear Leader’s eternal and unconditional love.” I would add that I had not worked diligently enough to fulfill the mission that the party ordered us to do, or did not study hard enough, or did not love my comrades enough. This last one was very important, because we were all comrades in the journey to fight against “American bastards,” or “insane Western wolves.” I would conclude, “Since then, our Dear Leader has forgiven me because of his benevolent, gracious leadership. I thank him, and I will do better next week.”
After we had finished our public confessions, it was time to criticize others. I would always jump up and volunteer. I was really good at it. Usually I would pick one classmate who would then have to stand up and listen intently while I listed his or her transgressions: He was not following what our Leader taught us. Or she was not participating in the group mission. When I was finished, my victim would have to thank me and assure everyone that he or she would correct the behavior. Eventually it was my turn to be criticized. I hated it, of course, but I would never let it show in my face.
The self-criticism meetings in Hyesan could be intense, but the ones in Kowon were brutal. The people in this very isolated and patriotic part of the country really thought of themselves as revolutionaries. Their devotion to the regime hadn’t been compromised with too much exposure to the world beyond the borders. And the authorities seemed determined to keep it that way as long as they could.
• • •
I was almost ten years old now, and my mother enrolled me in the local middle school, even though I had skipped the last two years of elementary school. I found the course work bewildering. And the schools in Kowon were much more rigid than the ones I had attended in Hyesan. Here the children were never allowed to do anything alone. In the morning, after we finished our collective labor cleaning the streets or polishing the monuments, the schoolchildren were expected to line up and march to class. We would swing our arms in unison, singing cheerful songs with lyrics like, “How bright is our socialist country! We are the new generation!” We usually did the same thing going home at the end of a day of study.
In North Korea, schoolchildren do more than study. They are part of the unpaid labor force that keeps the country from total collapse. I always had to carry a set of work clothes in my school bag, for the afternoons when they marched us off for manual labor. In the spring we helped the collective farms with their planting. Our job was to carry stones to clear the fields, put in the corn, and haul water. In June and July we weeded the fields, and i
n fall we were sent out to pick up the rice or corn or beans that had been missed by the harvesters. Our small fingers were good for this purpose. I hated this work. But we were told we couldn’t waste a single grain when people were hungry.
The only time I was happy in the fields was when I found a mouse hole, because mice were doing the same kind of work. You could dig up their homes and find a couple of pounds of corn or beans they were storing for later. If we were lucky, we would catch the mice, too. But all the grain we gleaned from the fields belonged to the school, not us. At the end of the day, the teachers collected whatever we found. They didn’t want us to take any grain for ourselves, so they would line us up and say, “Show us your pockets!” We learned to put our work clothes over our school clothes so we could hide some grain in the bottom layer and bring it home to eat.
One of the big problems in North Korea was a fertilizer shortage. When the economy collapsed in the 1990s, the Soviet Union stopped sending fertilizer to us and our own factories stopped producing it. Whatever was donated from other countries couldn’t get to the farms because the transportation system had also broken down. This led to crop failures that made the famine even worse. So the government came up with a campaign to fill the fertilizer gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive.
“Remember not to poop in school!” my aunt in Kowon told me every day. “Wait to do it here!”
Whenever my aunt in Songnam-ri traveled away from home and had to poop somewhere else, she loudly complained that she didn’t have a plastic bag with her to save it. “Next time I’ll remember!” she would say. Thankfully, she never actually did this.