Stars Between the Sun and Moon (14 page)

Chapter Twenty

Tears streamed down
my face, and my hands trembled so much I couldn't lift the teacup to my mouth. Before me stood Wangxiung, his brother, their uncle and some men from the village. The men shook their heads, looks of concern on their faces. There was even a doctor, who gave me some melon and then felt my pulse and forehead.

A man who spoke some Korean asked me what was wrong. By now, Zhiying was also crying. “I'm not sick. I just cannot live here,” I sobbed. “I want to go back home.”

The man translated my answer for the others. Wangxiung's uncle, a fat man wearing a beige suit on which the buttons had popped, banged his fist on the table and said something in Mandarin.

“They say they paid 3,000 yuan for you. You must stay.”

The translator stared at me for a long time. “I know the problem,” he said finally, first in Korean and then in Mandarin. “Wangxiung cannot perform his husbandly duties with you. I buy you instead.” The man turned to Wangxiung's uncle. “I buy this woman. I will know what to do with her.”

“No, no, no,” I yelled in a panic, running over to the corner and grabbing a broom. I pointed it toward the translator. “Get away!” I ordered in Korean. At least I belonged to someone who did not want me in that way. Escape would come, I vowed. In the meantime, I would bear Wangxiung.

Wangxiung's family bowed when the translator told them I had agreed to stay. They were so grateful they spent the rest of the afternoon pampering me with teas, fruits, rice dishes and meats. I knew now what I had to do: show Wangxiung affection and loyalty. Eventually, the family would let me go outside, perhaps even beyond the stone wall that surrounded their property.

The next day, I cleaned the room Wangxiung and I shared. When Wangxiung emerged dusty from the barn, I patted him down with a damp cloth, wiped his feet and then made him some rice. I sang him songs I had learned at school. One of those songs Wangxiung and his family also knew, at least the Chinese translation. It was a song about communism.

Over the next week that followed, Wangxiung's mother made me kimchi and a red Chinese dress. Zhiying, using our special sign language, told me it was my wedding dress. Lying to her about my true intentions was the most difficult thing. A knot formed in my throat as I smiled and communicated back to her, “Happy. I am happy to marry Wangxiung.”

A week later,
as Wangxiung's family sat in the main room singing songs and eating pork and chicken, I motioned I had to go to the washroom. I got up, expecting one of the women to accompany me. Neither of them made a move to do so. They finally trusted me to go alone. I could hardly conceal my excitement. Tea-lamps lit the house of heavy wood, and a waning moon cast shadows across the pigsty. On my way back, as I was passing through the kitchen, I glanced over at the front door. Miraculously, the padlock was undone. I slipped off my shoes and socks and crept toward it like one of the barn kittens, ears alert for any sound of creaking floorboards. I opened the door slowly, not wanting the hinges to screech. To my surprise, the padlock on the main gate was also undone.

My heart beat fast as I slipped through the metal opening. I darted into the sugar cane field across the dirt road before putting my sandals back on.

For the next few days, I walked through fields and along dirt roads. I slept on the dry earth under plane trees during the day and waited until the late evening, when I could hear villagers finally making their way to sleep, to move forward. The Chinese woke early. When they did, I would hide myself again. The only food I ate was grass. My muscles ached. But I could not stop. Doing so would mean death. My goal was to find the highway Wangxiung and I had driven on, then follow it back to Beijing. There, I would demand Gwangwon take me back to the border town where he had bought me. I knew he had no reason to do this other than compassion and I wasn't sure he had any. But I had no other options.

As dawn approached on the fifth day, I made my way toward the forest only to be greeted by men's voices. I flung myself down in some long grass and spied on them as they changed the tires on a dusty blue truck. I had seen similar trucks carrying eggs to market on the back roads. Off to the side, a man a little younger than me was leaning against a motorbike and eating some bread.

I crept closer, overcome by my craving for food. I snuck up behind the man and tapped him softly on the back. He turned with a jolt and started yelling at me in Mandarin. When I spoke a few words in Korean, he quieted down. He handed me a piece of paper and a pen, and I wrote the word, “yuan.” I flashed my hands, meaning I had no money, then rubbed my stomach.

The man understood. He gave me some of his bread, then helped me onto the back of his bike.

As the bike roared back down the dirt road the way I had come, I started to panic. I grabbed the man's black jacket and closed my eyes, wanting to leap off the bike but afraid I would die if I did so. Into the wind I mumbled the words over and over again: “Please stop. Please stop now. Don't take me back to Wangxiung.”

The man did eventually stop, his bike kicking up dust that got stuck in my throat and made me cough. When my eyes could focus, I saw that he had brought us to a small restaurant built from faded planks of wood. He motioned for me to follow him inside.

The man said a few words to a stout Chinese lady, and then I followed him to a secluded section in the back. Immediately, food began arriving: noodles and pork, vegetable dishes and ribs covered in thick syrup. I ate with my hands, which were covered in dirt, leaning over my plate and devouring the food like an animal. The man ate nothing, just sipped on a drink I could smell was alcohol. I ate all the food that was set in front of me. Then when I was finished, the man shut the doors in our section of the restaurant, laid his black jacket on the ground and motioned for me to lie down.

I wish that day could be blocked from my memories. But I was hungry and desperate and alive enough inside that I knew I had to survive. The man saw my reluctance, and he laid twenty yuan on the table. When it was over, he drove me close to where we had met earlier in the day. I hopped off the bike as easily as I had got on.

I lay half-awake
under a tree until it got dark. Then I walked all night, slowing only long enough to stuff an ear of overripe corn into my shirt to eat later. I slept all the next day and the next night I came upon a garbage dump, where I sifted through the bags at the top of the pile looking for food. I nibbled on the barest of rib bones and ate some moldy noodles. I even fought with one of the tame dogs to get hold of the bag of rice it was eating.

When I felt the bile moving up my throat, I forced it down. I had to keep the food, rotten as it was, inside me for strength. By the light of the waxing moon, I saw an abandoned sofa, springs popping up through its orange cushions. Fatigue overtook me and I could do nothing but collapse.

The dogs sniffed and licked my face. The bugs that lived in the sofa moved to a moister home, my skin. But I let them. All I was capable of doing was blinking.

The next morning, I made it to the highway. I searched the roadside for signs to Beijing, but I could not read the language. I had passed a small pond, and I decided to head back there and bathe. I rinsed my clothes and hair and then returned to the side of the road, hiding behind some bushes. I watched two Chinese women carrying parasols and big bags flag down a bus. I studied their expressions and tried to make out the words they said to the driver. I pulled out the twenty yuan, and as the sun began to set, I found the courage to step out onto the curb. When I saw a bus come, I stuck my hand in the air, like the women had done, and waved.

When the driver slowed, I pretended I was mute, not wanting to be discovered as an illegal. I pointed to my mouth, then waved the twenty yuan in front of him. He gave me two yuan in return.

On the outskirts of Beijing, the bus was pulled over. Police got on board and started checking all of the men's identification. I sank down in my seat, trying to be invisible. But the police ignored all of the women, waving from the roadside for the driver to continue.

I got off the bus at the main station. From there I wandered for several days, looking for the neighbourhood Gwangwon had taken me to. I slept in the parks at night, making sure I was gone by dawn when men and women came out to exercise. I ate bruised fruit and pieces of bread from garbage bins. I used my remaining yuan to buy some ramen noodles that I ate raw.

I was used to hunger. Chosun had prepared me well for enduring the pain of famine on the streets of Beijing. But one night as I slept under a stone bridge, rain dripping into the gutter, my mind drifted to my childhood. How far I had fallen, how far all of us from the North had fallen. Our gaunt faces and dirty bodies were shadows now, to be used and abused by each other and by the Chinese. Communism, I had been taught as a child, was a system in which people treated each other as equals. Did such a thing really exist however? I began to question it.

Being laughed at by day by children in the parks or spat on by the elderly men playing games, being so desperate that I let a man buy me a meal in exchange for sex . . . that was not communism. Now I understood what Kim Il-sung had fought for. I felt deeply the humiliation of being used, the humiliation of being a shadow.

But what equality had my family and I enjoyed in Chosun? We were treated poorly because my mother's family included members who had fled. My son had been stolen from me, because as a single and divorced mother in Chosun, I was at the bottom of any hierarchy. My son had been taken from me. I wanted to scream, like I had when I watched the tiny flower girl's sister being scalded with hot water. But now I understood why the flower girl had remained so quiet through it all. When you're punched so much that you have to live in the shadows, you end up losing your voice.

Chapter Twenty-one

On my fifteenth
day of scavenging in Beijing, I saw a wooden house at the top of a hill where people could go to rest and view an artificial lake. I had seen this house through the window of Gwangwon's home. I knew I was close, finally, to finding him.

It was night when I located the place where he lived. I pounded on the heavy veneer door and Gwangwon's wife opened it. She whisked me inside. Her cheeks were flushed and I wondered if she was sick. But she brushed my concerns away when I asked. She led me to the washhouse and began drawing me a bath. “I knew you would leave him,” she said, as she took my clothes to burn them in a metal bin in the yard. “I just didn't think you would come back here.”

“Can you take me to Adong?” I asked, pouring warm water over my head. The water in the tub had already turned black.

“Do you want us to find you another husband?”

“No.”

“What will you do?”

“I have relatives in China, on my father's side. But I don't know their names or what they look like. What can I do?” I stared desperately into her eyes for answers, but none came. “I need food for my family,” I stammered as I began to cry. “Can I work somewhere to make money for food I can take back?”

“I know of no jobs for illegal women from Chosun,” she sighed. Her tone of voice reminded me of Youngrahn. I felt the sting of a woman who believed she was better than me but wanted something from me as well.

“I can find you another husband,” she said slyly. “A good one. One you can fall in love with. I promise this time.”

“Let me go back to Adong first to see the man by the river who bought my puppy,” I said. “I want to arrange for some food to be taken back to Chosun for my family.” I paused, thinking fast. “If you help me with that, you can do as you wish with me afterwards.”

“I'll prepare some dinner for you,” she said, smiling coquettishly. “I'll also let Gwangwon know your plans.”

Gwangwon's wife took
me to the train station the next day, after giving me some new clothes, a tight-fitting burgundy dress with a pair of slacks underneath and matching Chinese slippers. After paying for my ticket, she slipped a hundred yuan into my hand. “The man who sold you in Adong will be there when you arrive. He will take you to his home and organize some food to be sent to your relatives. Then we'll find you a good husband.”

I bowed, showing my agreement.

“There is nowhere else for you to go,” she warned me. “You realize this is your only choice?”

I nodded.

“Then I trust you won't run away,” she said.

As I watched Gwangwon's wife fade into the crowd, I scanned people's faces looking for anyone I thought might be Korean. If I didn't find anyone, my alternate plan was to run away from the train station. But I didn't want to think about that. I refused to live on the streets of Beijing again.

“Are you going to Helong?” I heard a high-pitched voice say in Korean. I looked down and saw a boy of about eight, bowing in front of me.

“Maybe,” I replied, looking into the boy's soft round face. A white bandage covered one eye.

“Are you going to Helong?” This time the question came from a woman with honey-brown eyes and hair neatly tied into a bun. She was ethnic Korean, dressed in a sleek-fitting blue silk dress.

“I could be,” I replied after greeting her and bowing. Although I had bathed and dressed in new clothes, I felt dirty beside this woman.

“Would you like to sit with us on the train?” she asked. “That is, if you are going to Helong?”

I swallowed hard. “Of course,” I said, hiding my nervousness. All I knew about Helong was that it was the main city in the Yanbian prefecture, a region in China inhabited mostly by ethnic Koreans who had lived there since before the revolution. I could only hope that my train ticket to Adong would be accepted.

As her son slept, the woman told me he had injured his eye while playing with a gun. They were on their way back to Helong from Beijing, where the boy had had surgery. “We hope he will regain some of his vision,” she said, stroking his hair. At that moment, I longed to hold Sungmin just one more time.

I told this woman, whose name was Eunhee, that I had been sold as a concubine to a Chinese man. “I would be willing to find a new husband,” I lied, “as long as he is a good man and treats me well. Maybe you can help? I can't go home yet. I have no food or money, and my parents are dying.”

“My brother and my parents need some help around their farm,” she said after a minute. “Maybe you can work there for a while.”

Eunhee's family had
a farm outside Helong on which they grew beans, corn and rice and raised pigs. These pigs were well fed on grains and pure ground corn, not feces. It was harvest season, so I went out into the fields at dawn to work alongside Eunhee's younger brother, Jungsoo, who had sad eyes and leathered skin from working under the sun. He was physically strong, determined in his work, and smelled of mud and hay. There was also a gentleness to him. As planting season drew on, we took comfort in the quiet of each other as we worked side by side.

“You do more work in a day than my wife ever did in a week,” he said matter-of-factly near the end of the season. It was the first time he had mentioned having a wife.

I was paid a small salary for my work on the farm at the end of each week. I placed the yuan I was given in my shoe. My plan was to pay someone going back to Chosun in mid-summer to deliver white rice to my parents.

Eunhee's family, including her aging mother, embraced me at first. The mother liked having another daughter in the house to tend to the chores. Eunhee was busy caring for her disabled son, whose eyesight had not fully returned. Even Jungsoo's father, who said little and did even less, would nod his approval of my presence.

By the dulling coals of the fire, Jungsoo and I drew closer to each other. As we checked the fields on mild summer days, he slowly opened up to me about his life. His wife had left for Beijing when their son was only a year old. She said she was leaving to find work and earn some money, and then she would return. But she never did. Two years after her departure, she sent a letter to Jungsoo saying she was not coming back. She abandoned their son, Moonjae, a quiet child who had started calling me mother.

As harvest season arrived, Jungsoo asked if I would move into his stone and wood house, located a few metres from his mother's home inside the family compound. I felt safe with him and accepted. Jungsoo even helped me to find a man who would take food to my parents and let my family know I was safe and where I was living.

But Jungsoo's family, who had accepted me for the work I was doing, changed when they saw how close he and I had grown.

“When Moonjae's mother returns, Jungsoo will have to take her back. You will have to leave,” Jungsoo's mother would say to me, as we ate our family meals of noodles and pork. “Because of the child, he will need to live with her.”

I glanced at Moonjae, who was watching me with pleading eyes. Jungsoo had confided that Moonjae's mother was cold with him, rarely holding him or looking at him with love.

Jungsoo and I didn't love each other, but we could hold each other's sadness. That is what cemented our relationship. I had no status in China, Jungsoo's mother would remind me every time she saw me. Eunhee, who had been so kind to me at first, now informed me that if I had a child with her brother, the Chinese government would not accept it. I risked being deported to Chosun, where the child would be killed.

“There is nothing you can do about that,” she explained with a cool air. “If your family had been here before the liberation, things would be different. But now you don't belong here.”

Word spread that
the Chinese police were raiding houses they suspected of harbouring illegal women from Chosun. Many women, I discovered, had done what I had, left Chosun in search of food and then agreed to marry single ethnic Korean men or be sold to Chinese men to act as their wives. These marriages were not legal. China didn't recognize them so there were never any wedding ceremonies held. Whenever Jungsoo's family's friends came to visit, they would talk about the men in Yanbian prefecture who had taken on wives from Chosun. “These women just showed up and knocked on the men's doors,” a squat man named Mandol exclaimed. “The women are dirty and wet from crossing the Tumen River. But they'll do anything because they are so poor and desperate.” The friend winked and nudged Jungsoo's arm. “What about the woman you are keeping here?” he asked, as if I was not in the room.

Jungsoo shrugged and looked over at me. I blushed and lowered my head.

“Several of the men in town have made lots of money arranging marriages for these women,” Mandol continued. “Did you pay for her? Are you going to sell her?”

Jungsoo shook his head. “How do the police know which houses to go to?” he asked.

“They know who is from Chosun and who isn't,” his friend said. “Just look at her.” He pointed at me, acknowledging my presence for the first time. “She is so sad. There is no life in that face. But maybe in bed?”

When Jungsoo's son, Moonjae, entered the room, the men switched to talking politics.

In the darkest part of the night, as I lay awake, I would think about Moonjae and feel a string to him that I didn't feel for Jungsoo. I knew I shouldn't let that string tie itself into a knot. Each morning, I would vow to watch over the child as if I were an auntie, nothing more. But when I saw his droopy eyes look up at me with such familiarity and trust, a pain ran through me.

The pain of longing for Sungmin. My thoughts would turn to my own son. I would wonder if he remembered me. In his darkest nights, did he long for me? One day, I hoped I would be reunited with him. I had to believe what the fortune teller had said was true. Sungmin would look for me when he reached military age.