The big effort to collect waste peaked in January, so it could be ready for growing season. Our bathrooms in North Korea were usually far away from the house, so you had to be careful that the neighbors didn’t steal from you at night. Some people would lock up their outhouses to keep the poop thieves away. At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find poop and carry it back to class. So if we saw a dog pooping in the street, it was like gold. My uncle in Kowon had a big dog who made a big poop—and everyone in the family would fight over it. This is not something you see every day in the West.
• • •
My mother worked at all kinds of jobs in Kowon. She did facial massages and eyebrow tattoos for women. She bought and sold videocassettes and televisions on the black market. It still wasn’t enough to keep us fed with rice. Once again my sister and I would go to the countryside to look for wild plants and insects to fill our stomachs. I loved the sweet white flowers of the false acacia tree that grew wild in the mountains. But the best thing to find was grasshoppers. My motor skills had improved as I got older, and I was really good at catching them. When my mother fried them, they were delicious to eat.
Most wild foods, though, were not so good for humans. They were just to fill you up. When I walked in the hills, I would pluck lots of different leaves—some for me, and some for the rabbits we kept back in town. They were my good friends; we would share meals together. Even now when I go for a walk I can tell which kind of plant is the rabbits’ favorite. But I still don’t like salad very much because it reminds me of those hard times.
When I was living in Kowon, I raised the rabbits from babies and gave them names like Red Eye, Blackie, and Goldie. But they could not be pets because when the time came, we skinned and ate them. Most of the time, it was the only meat we had. The pelts were very valuable, too. In North Korea, all the schools had to collect rabbit fur for the soldiers’ winter uniforms. Every student had to bring five pelts each semester. But it’s difficult to tan your own rabbit leather, and the military had high standards, so the school would often reject the bad ones. The only way to be sure you could fill your quota was to buy expertly tanned skins in the jangmadang. Of course, the school administrators didn’t give all the rabbit furs to the military—they kept them for themselves to make some money. I know this because my mother had a business buying and selling rabbit furs. In fact, sometimes she would buy pelts from the school that she had just sold to customers looking to fill their quotas.
This insane system was good for my mother, but hard on everybody else.
• • •
When I was about eleven years old, I began to follow in my parents’ footsteps. My mother gave me some seed money to start my own business. I used the loan to buy some rice vodka to bribe the guard at a state-owned orchard that grew persimmons. He let me and my sister sneak in and pick the fruit. We filled a big metal bucket and carried the persimmons for miles back to Kowon, where I sold them in the jangmadang.
“These are the most delicious persimmons!” I cried out to the customers as they walked by. “Buy them here!” At the end of the day, I had enough money to pay back my mother, buy some candy, and purchase another bottle to bribe the orchard guard. My sister picked fruit with me until my mother put a stop to our little business venture: we were wearing out our shoes too quickly walking to the orchard, and she couldn’t afford to buy new ones.
Still, I learned something important from my short time as a market vendor: once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself. Before the public distribution system collapsed, the government alone decided who would survive and who would starve. The markets took away the government’s control. My small market transactions made me realize that I had some control over my own fate. It gave me another tiny taste of freedom.
Nine
Jangmadang Generation
In the fall of 2005, my mother had to go into hiding: the police in Kowon were looking her.
In North Korea, you can’t just choose where you want to live. The government has to give you permission to move outside your assigned district, and the authorities don’t make it easy. The only good reasons are a job transfer, marriage, or divorce. Even though she was born and raised in the house her brother Min Sik now owned, my mother’s official residence was still in Hyesan. Illegally changing your residence doesn’t really matter for children, but for a grown-up like my mother, it was a big problem.
She had managed to stay out of trouble for a long time because my uncle was a party member and his wife was head of her inminban, so they had good connections with the local authorities. Once in a while the police would visit the house and ask my mother to stop by the station, which was a strong hint that they wanted a bribe to ignore her situation. But my mother was very busy and didn’t pay enough attention to their signals. The police waited patiently for a long time, but they finally decided to send her to a reeducation camp for punishment. When she found out the police were looking for her, my mother ran away to stay with some friends. And that is why she was not home on the sunny afternoon when my father showed up at my uncle’s door.
Eunmi was at school, and I was alone in our little room when I heard the dog barking loudly. Then I heard the sound of a man’s voice talking to my uncle. My heart started pounding because the voice sounded familiar, but I wouldn’t let myself believe it was my father. He had been in prison for almost three years, and I never expected to see him again. Then I heard my uncle calling, “Yeonmi-ya! Yeonmi-ya! Your father is here!”
I came running into the main house, and there was a stranger sitting with my uncle.
“Abuji?” I whispered. “Father?”
I hadn’t allowed myself to speak that word in a long time, and it felt strange on my tongue. I took a closer look and it really was my father, but he was extremely skinny, and they had shaved off all his hair in prison. I always thought he was the biggest man in the world, my hero who could do everything. But now he seemed so tiny. Worse, his voice was so fearful and quiet I could hardly recognize it. I stood in front of him as he touched my face and hair, like a blind person reading a book, saying, “Is this really Yeonmi? Is this really Yeonmi?”
He didn’t cry, he just looked at me. I wasn’t a baby anymore. Now I was a young girl of twelve, almost an adolescent. “Is this really you, my daughter?”
I wanted to jump into his arms and hug him, but I was living under my uncle’s roof, and I was afraid to show him how happy I was to see my father. My uncle, once my father’s good friend, hated my father now, and often said terrible things about him. He blamed him for being irresponsible and getting arrested, leaving others with the burden of his wife and children. I was so sad that people who had been so respectful of my father when he was wealthy and powerful now treated him so badly. After a while, I couldn’t stop myself and I threw my arms around my father and held on tight, afraid to ever let him go again.
After my father was arrested, I had stopped acting like a child. Now that he was back, I spent every moment I could snuggled in his lap, just like when I was a baby. And I wanted to do the same things we did when I was little. I used to sit on my father’s knees and get bounced like a horse. I wanted to do that again, and even asked him to give me an airplane ride on his feet. My poor father tried to do it, but he put me down quickly, saying, “Ouch! My little puppy has really gotten big!” That was one of my nicknames as a small child. It made me cry to hear him say it again.
When Eunmi came home from school, we sent for my mother with word that my father was out of prison. He told us that he had gotten very sick, and he had bribed the warden to let him out on temporary leave.
We were shocked by my father’s condition when we helped him change his clothes. You could see the bones under his flesh and his skin was coming off in sheets from malnutrition. My mother told me to run and buy some tofu water to bathe him and help heal his wounds. He was so hungry he wanted to eat
everything, but his system couldn’t take it after starving for so long. So she had to control him and make sure he ate only a little rice at a time or he would get sick.
When he was well enough to talk, he told her what had happened.
The warden knew my father was in prison for a big financial crime, and my father convinced him that he had hidden some money with a woman in Hyesan. If the warden would let my father out for sick leave, he promised he would give him one million North Korean won. That was a huge bribe, enough money to buy a fine house. The warden was greedy enough to believe him, but my father never intended to pay him, even if he’d had the money. He figured that once he got out of prison for medical reasons, they couldn’t suddenly drag him back without exposing their own corruption. It might be possible, after a while, for them to say my father had recovered enough to return to prison. But he would worry about that some other time.
My father persuaded the warden to allow him to visit his family in Kowon before traveling to Hyesan. There he would be released to his brother, Park Jin, to help him get treatment for the worsening pain in his stomach. The warden sent a prison doctor to travel with him, supposedly to escort him all the way to Hyesan. His real purpose, of course, was to collect the money. But he would not succeed, because there was no money to collect.
My father stayed in Kowon for a few days, and then left for Hyesan. Once he was settled there, he would send for us.
My mother, meanwhile, decided to turn herself in to the police and was sentenced to a month of reeducation at something called the “workers’ training corps,” which was like a mobile slave labor camp. The prisoners slept together in a lice-infested room and were sent out during the day to build bridges and work on other heavy construction projects. There were only a few women in my mother’s unit, but the guards made them work as hard as the men. If anyone was too slow, the whole group would be forced to run around the camp all night without any sleep as punishment. To make sure that didn’t happen, the prisoners would beat one another if someone wasn’t working fast enough. The guards didn’t have to do a thing. And the pace was so grueling that some prisoners were near death after a few weeks in the camps. When my mother started her sentence, it was nearing the end of fall, and she suffered in the cold with a thin jacket and no gloves.
Sometimes the construction sites were far away, but when my mother was closer to Kowon, my sister and I visited her in the field. The first time we went, my sister and I woke up at five o’clock in the morning to cook for her. We knew the prisoners were never given enough to eat. I cooked a small pumpkin and mixed it with rice and corn, then I sliced some radishes and cured them with salt. Salted radishes are the poor person’s kimchi; we couldn’t afford the ingredients necessary to make the spicy sauce for the traditional pickled cabbage.
We started walking at six a.m., when it was still dark, but we took a wrong turn on the way to the construction site. As we walked, we became so hungry that we started tasting the food we had brought with us. By the time we got to the work site, we had eaten all of it. We both felt bad arriving with nothing to offer, but my mother was so happy to see us. She was still our mother and more concerned about us than herself, so she brought us some water to drink. The guards gave her only a few moments to visit with us, so we visited as often as possible, bringing food with us when we could.
• • •
Thankfully, my mother’s term at the workers’ training corps was short. She managed to bribe someone at the police station and was released after only sixteen days. After resting with us for a short time, she took the train to Hyesan to visit my father. She knew the police would hound her as long as her residence was in Hyesan—and the only way to change it while he was alive was to divorce my father. They still loved each other, but they secretly agreed that a divorce was the only practical solution. If he had to go back to prison, Kowon would be a better place for the family to live, because it was warmer and cheaper than Hyesan. So they acted quickly, and the divorce was recorded in April 2006.
Meanwhile, a friend of my father’s gave him a place to live rent free until he could pay him back. He had plans to revive his business with my mother’s help. At least for now, he wanted us to move back to Hyesan to be with him. In May, I took the train north by myself to live with my father; Eunmi and my mother joined us a few months later. We were finally together again.
• • •
My father’s apartment was on the top floor of an eight-story building in the suburb of Wiyeon, a few miles east of our old neighborhood in Hyesan. The apartment overlooked the Yalu River, and you could see China from the window. There were three rooms, which we shared with two other families. The walls were thin, so we had to speak very softly or everyone could hear our business. Because there was no elevator in the building, we had to walk up eight flights in a dark stairwell to get to the apartment—that’s why in North Korea the lower-floor apartments are more desirable. The less money you have, the higher up you live.
My father was receiving medical treatment for his stomach problems, but once again, none of the doctors could find out what was wrong with him. He was in a real dilemma, because he was too sick to work, but if he got healthy again, they would send him back to prison. Instead he lived in a kind of limbo. His ID card had been destroyed when he went to prison—only human beings can have IDs and he was considered subhuman. Without the card, you can’t go anywhere, so it made it impossible for him to travel around buying metal to sell to the smugglers. Besides, he constantly had to check in with the police, who were keeping a close eye on him. So he stayed home and cared for me and my sister while my mother took over the business.
The same man who offered my father the apartment was willing to invest some start-up money in a business venture my mother proposed. She and the man’s son traveled to a place near Songnam-ri to buy silver, then they came back to Hyesan and sold it to smugglers. My parents made a small profit from these deals, but we were still very poor. Often our only food was black frozen potatoes, which made my father even sicker.
I had missed Hyesan so much after we moved away, and I couldn’t wait to see all my friends again. Yong Ja had grown so big and tall—at least for a North Korean. She had always been a strong girl, but now she was taking Tae Kwan Do lessons that made her even tougher. It made me feel safe to spend time with her, because so much of Hyesan had changed in the three years I’d been away. The city seemed livelier and more prosperous now, because of the legal and illegal trade with China. And the young people looked and acted so different. Older girls straightened their wavy hair with a cream called “Magic” that was smuggled across the border. Some were even dyeing their hair and wearing jeans, which was illegal. Jeans were symbols of American decadence, and if the police caught you wearing them they would take scissors and cut them up. Then you could be sentenced to a day of reeducation or a week of extra work. But it didn’t stop the teenagers from trying new things.
Yong Ja explained to me that all the teenagers were now “dating”—which was really just boys and girls hanging out together. But it seemed incredibly strange to me. Even kindergarten students were pretending to have boyfriends and girlfriends. She warned me about some of the new rules between the sexes. For instance, if a boy made a popping or clucking sound with his mouth when you walked by, you shouldn’t turn around and look at him unless you were interested in dating him. If you did, he would never leave you alone. I made this mistake a few times because I was so confused by these new customs. In fact, I felt like a country bumpkin. Yong Ja even laughed at me for the Kowon accent I had picked up while I was away. The people in the interior of North Korea speak much more slowly than residents of the Chinese border towns. Arriving from Kowon was like an American from Atlanta moving to New York City. It took a while for me to sound like a native again.
I enrolled in middle school in Wiyeon and made a new group of friends, mostly girls who were a few years older than me. Again I had
skipped a few grades, and was falling far behind in school. When Eunmi arrived from Kowon, she was fifteen years old and further along in her schooling. She quickly made lots of her own friends and we didn’t hang out with each other as often as before. She also started dating for the first time, and fell for a boy whose father was from China. My mother urged her to break up with him because he was from such a poor songbun, even worse than ours. Eunmi did as she was asked, but it caused some friction in our family.
My new friends knew all about the latest fashions from watching South Korean soap operas and international music videos. Nobody had home computers, and there was, of course, no connection to the Internet to download illegal foreign media. Instead it was smuggled across the river from China every night. Thin DVDs had replaced bulky cassettes, making it easier to bring more of them into the country. What had been a trickle just a few years ago was now a flood.
Some of my friends had rooms with thick curtains they could use for watching DVDs, so we could play movies and dance around to the soundtracks. We also listened to music tapes and CDs—anything we could get our hands on. My sister and I liked the sad love songs best. Our favorite was about two people who made an oath to be true to each other by crossing their pinky fingers. Then one of them was suddenly gone. It always made us cry.
If it wasn’t for those foreign DVDs and CDs, we wouldn’t have known any songs except for the ones we were taught about Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. We would try to change those to make them more interesting. One of the older boys we hung out with played the guitar, and when we sang along with him, we would leave out the parts about the Kims. Whenever I sang those songs, I felt more free. It was lucky we didn’t get caught. But we were young and didn’t think about the future.
North Koreans my age and younger are sometimes called the Jangmadang Generation, because we grew up with markets, and we couldn’t remember a time when the state provided for everyone’s needs. We didn’t have the same blind loyalty to the regime that was felt by our parents’ generation. Still, while the market economy and outside media weakened our dependence on the state, I couldn’t make the mental leap to see the foreign movies and soap operas I loved to watch as models for a life I could lead.