The Beloved Daughter (14 page)

Shin opened his mouth but then closed it again. I stared at the precinct building in silence. “I still don’t understand,” Shin confessed after a few minutes. “Surely God wouldn’t punish your father for trying to save you. Would he?”

I bit my lip, wishing Shin would ask me about something else, anything else about my hometown. “Father’s faith didn’t really work that way,” I told him. “I don’t think he worried much about God punishing him.” Shin leaned toward me. “Father loved Jesus. He obeyed God because his heart overflowed with thankfulness, not because he was trying to escape punishment or win the Lord’s approval.”

Shin rubbed his hands together. “He didn’t try to earn God’s favor?” I shook my head. Shin leapt up and began to pace in the snow.

“Because no mortal could ever earn the favor of the Almighty,” Shin went on. I was shocked when Shin’s eyes met mine; for the first time since I met him, Shin’s face was shining with joy. “It’s not about what we can do for God. We can’t do anything good on our own.” Shin spoke rapidly now as he voiced his thoughts out loud. “It’s not a matter of just trying harder. It’s a matter of love and simple trust.” I longed to be caught up in Shin’s newfound discovery, but instead I was baffled. Shin may as well have been speaking to me in the language of the Chinese patrol guards whose watchtowers stood fixed across the frozen Tumen River.

Shin grabbed my hand. I wondered how a simple philosophy could bring Shin so much happiness. “That’s what the good news is,” Shin proclaimed. “It means that we can never offer God a life of true obedience. Instead it’s his power and love that make us acceptable to him.”

I was glad for Shin’s apparent epiphany, but my mind was still stuck in the precinct building nine years ago, my ears still ringing with the echoes of gunfire.

The Crossing

“Whoever hears my words and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.” John 5:24

Shin and I lay down to rest in the dense forest overlooking Hasambong. I don’t think I’ve ever missed my father as much as I did that night underneath the starry sky. Even sleep didn’t ease the hollow ache in my heart.

Shin shook me awake in the middle of the night.

“It’s time,” he announced to the starlit stillness. We had already decided that tonight was the night we would sneak across the Tumen border into China.

I rushed with Shin toward the frozen river, praying that the border patrolmen wouldn’t see us. We arrived at the bank of the Tumen a little while later, panting hard and sweating in spite of the cold.

“Only think,” I whispered, hoping my forced confidence might bring us good luck, “you’ll see your daughter soon.”

Shin stared off into the distance. “Before we go, I need to tell you something.” He turned to stare at me with fierce intensity. I flushed in spite of the cold night air and for some reason wondered if he was about to kiss me. A dog howled in the distance, jerking Shin into action. His thoughts still unspoken, Shin held my elbow, and we ran as fast as we dared on top of the ice and snow, crouching in the starlight. As soon as we started moving, I regretted not waiting for a cloudy night. With all of my senses heightened, the air was animated with noises: a twig breaking, Shin breathing heavily by my side. When we reached the middle of the river, the ice groaned loudly.

“It’s about to crack!” My body tensed and refused to move.

Shin grabbed my arm. “That ice is at least half a meter thick,” he assured me. “You’re as safe as you were on the shore. Now, hurry.” If Shin weren’t by my side, I would never have found the courage to continue across the frozen river. As it was, Shin pulled me along so that even if I wanted to turn back, I wouldn’t have been able to break free from his hold.

Shin and I made it to the opposite bank and fell in the snow. We paused by a small grove of bushes. I was no longer on Korean soil. Any sense of joy or exhilaration at our successful river crossing, however, was quickly dispelled when I heard a dog snarling. When I was a girl, I watched the Chinese guards patrolling the border with their wolf-like canines. I never imagined having to confront one of those beasts face to face.

Shin put his finger to his lip, and with his other hand he grabbed my elbow. We listened again; the canine’s warning growls were coming closer. Immediately Shin stood up and pulled me, half running, half tripping, up the riverbank.

In an instant, white lights from a watchtower illuminated the night sky. “Faster!” Shin called out. My lungs were bursting with exertion and fear. I begged God to protect us. A rock jutting out from a snow pile caught my boot. I screamed as I fell to the ground. My face slammed into the snow.

Shin was already several paces ahead, but he turned back and ran toward me. “Get up!” he shouted as another round of machine-gun fire sounded from the opposite direction. Shin gasped and fell on top of me. I tried to push him off, but he wouldn’t move.

“Stand up!” I begged. I reached to wipe some melted snow off my face. It was hot. And it wasn’t snow.

Was I shot? I explored my bloody face with my fingers. The blood wasn’t mine. It was Shin’s. I felt my friend’s neck for a pulse.

He was dead.

Closing my eyes, I finally managed to roll Shin off me. I ran ahead, leaving Shin’s body there at the edge of the riverbank.

I didn’t stop. Nearly blinded by tears and fright, I ran for what felt like hours until I collapsed. I crawled on my belly underneath some bushes with briars that tore at my coat and scratched my face. As I wiped Shin’s blood on the snowy dirt beneath me, I was confronted with the horrifying truth that I was alone, an illegal immigrant in a foreign country. I had no family. I had no friends.

And now, I didn’t even have anyone to guide or protect me.

PART FOUR

Sanhe

Jilin Province

China

Words Without Knowledge

“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Job 42:5-6

I didn’t know the name of the city I was hiding in. I had no idea which road would take me to Yanji. And what would I do there if I managed to find it? Shin was dead. The winter coat he purchased for me back in Kimchaek was stained with his blood, and my ears still rang with the sound of machine guns. The moon was low on the horizon. It wasn’t dawn yet, but I guessed sunrise was only a few hours away. Whatever plan I was about to conceive, I needed to come up with it soon.

I was too scared, or else I would have fled back to North Hamyong Province that very night. Although my terror of guard dogs and watchtowers kept me on the Chinese side of the border, I didn’t know where to go or what to do next. To travel to Yanji in search of some disabled seven-year-old didn’t make any sense. Even if Shin’s daughter was alive and I was somehow able to trace her whereabouts, I would only endanger the child as well as her caregiver by contacting them.

The starlit sky looked just like it did when I gazed up at it as a young child in my Hasambong home, only now I was completely alone, a refugee lost in a country that didn’t want me and wouldn’t shelter me.

And why didn’t God let me die instead of Shin? So that I could perish alone and forsaken in a foreign land? Why did Shin turn around to help me? Shin’s training as a detention guard should have taught him to leave me as easy prey for the guard dogs. Wouldn’t it be better if I perished and Shin lived? Then Shin could have gone on to find his daughter. Whom did I have in China? Whom did I have in the whole world?

Why did you bring me here? I demanded of God, who seemed to be mocking me by my mere survival. Any idealistic dreams I once held about China being a land of promise and freedom were dashed. Shin was dead. Although I didn’t yet know about the significant bribes the Chinese police offered for refugees, I did know they would send me back to North Korea if they found me. If Shin hadn’t helped me escape Camp 22 in the first place, I would be asleep now in the dorms. In an hour or two I would wake up to another shift in the fabric-cutting line. I wouldn’t have blood stained on my coat and on my face. I would know when my next meal would be, even if it was only a few bites
. Why did you ever let me flee?
I asked under my breath.
It would have been better for me to die than to live.

I pray, beloved daughter, that you have never felt so abandoned, so hopeless that you have dared utter such blasphemous words. But as I hid myself, stained in Shin’s blood, I poured out my heated complaints before the Lord. I demanded that God give me an account for my father’s cruel and painful death, for my mother’s slow and silent one, for the Old Woman’s desecrated memory, for Shin’s decision to help me escape Camp 22 only to perish and leave me stranded in a foreign country.

I wish that I could tell you how God spoke soothing and comforting words into my soul as I hid trapped under a thorn bush. But he did not.

Nor was he silent.

The Almighty responded to my complaints. And when he did, I was horrified at my outburst and my appalling lack of faith.

The stars shone above, each one proclaiming that the Creator I accused of injustice and wrongdoing was infinitely more powerful than I could ever fathom. The cold wind stung my face, reminding me that the God I charged with negligence was to be feared more than any National Security agent, armed border patrolman, or ravenous watchdog. The thorns of my hiding place broke open my skin. I had no choice but to admit that my misery didn’t compare to the punishment I earned by my own rebellion against God. In spite of my life’s nearly unbearable trials, I was still experiencing more grace than I deserved.

That night, I saw myself as I never had before. I was not Song Chung-Cha, Hyun-Ki’s righteous daughter who was occasionally forced by circumstances to go against God’s commands. I was Song Chung-Cha, who never once lived up to my name, who had no righteousness or piety at all to offer the Almighty to atone for my grave offenses of bitterness, doubt, and faithlessness.

I accused God of sin when he allowed my father to perish. I assumed that a holy God would excuse my adulterous relationship as Agent Yeong’s office maid because I was doing what I had to do to survive. I denied God’s omnipotence when he didn’t intervene while I was mistreated by over a dozen guards in the Old Woman’s cell. I spent years at Camp 22 living in either passive or open rebellion, refusing to bend my knee to the God that failed to prevent my family’s arrest so many years earlier.

I was horrified at my own shortcomings. To spend a lifetime in the detainment center seemed a far more bearable sentence than to fall into the eternal judgment of the God I had spurned repeatedly over the past twenty-one years.

Have mercy!
my tormented soul pleaded. I remembered what Shin told me just hours before his death:
“No mortal could ever earn the favor of the Almighty. We can’t do anything good on our own.”

Have mercy!
my wounded spirit cried out into the terrifying darkness. My sinfulness and rebellion were so obvious to me now.

Have mercy!
I begged again to the just and righteous Judge of both the living and the dead. It wasn’t until that moment, when I was almost certain that the earth would swallow me whole and deliver me directly to the gates of hell, that I felt God’s loving touch.

Beloved daughter, I wish I could be telling you this story face to face. You might read my words and imagine that the Almighty isn’t compassionate toward us, or that he doesn’t understand the pain and wounds of our hearts. The Almighty does see our brokenness, and he reaches out to us with indescribable grace and love. It’s just that I couldn’t accept his mercy and forgiveness until I first repented of my own rebellion against him.