The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (12 page)

Like my other friends, when I menstruated the first time I went through three emotions in sharp succession: shock, embarrassment and absolute panic. I had to use my wits to figure out what to do. Incredibly, most of us handled it, without telling anyone or asking our mothers for advice. My mother, the most sensible woman I knew, offered me none, just as my grandmother, I’m sure, had given her none.

It was at the height of my panic during my first menstrual cycle that one of the girls in class told me she’d seen something that had scared her at a public toilet near our school. She wanted to show me. We crept in there to take a look together. The place was dripping, dim, and stinking. Next to the hole of the squat toilet was a bloodied white plastic bag. Inside was a dead baby with a tiny blue-pink face. The mother must have given birth there and fled. The umbilical cord and the placenta lay next to it. I was shocked to the core and didn’t sleep that night.

That year, 1995, I dated my first boyfriend. He was four years older than me, and a hoodlum. His name was Tae-chul. He was tall, thin, and wore a Japanese casual jacket, the height of sophistication in Hyesan. He had a conceited little half-smile I found attractive. Every North Korean city has hoodlums. These are not violent criminals, but young people with the kind of personality that attracts followers and who often deal in banned goods. There is quite a lot of low-level crime they can get away with, as long as they do nothing that verges on the political and attracts the eyes of the
Bowibu.

He had money. He was also in the police academy and was training to be a policeman. Just walking with him thrilled me because of the attention I was getting. In fact, after he waited for me a few times outside the school gate, the rumours started flying about us. This was quite a serious matter, because when the word gets out that a girl has been dating, it’s not easy for her to find another match.

I worried about this, but I liked him. I was proud that he wanted to go out with me when so many other girls wanted him. We would go to his house to listen to South Korean pop cassettes and play the guitar and accordion together. Like any other boyfriend and girlfriend in North Korea of this age, we did not even kiss. Holding hands was as far as it went. Even then we were discreet. Our families were not aware of our romance and did not consider it improper for me to be at his house. My mother would have had a stroke if she’d known he was my boyfriend.

That year I found my duties with the Socialist Youth League more oppressive than ever. In spring we had to help plant rice saplings, in the summer we weeded and spread fertilizer, and in autumn came the harvest, which students and workers from all over the country helped with. This mass enterprise, in fields of flying red banners, was the epitome of communist idealism.

In the summer we were also ordered to dig tunnels around our school. The entire country was being mobilized, and everyone was on a war footing. Sirens wailed almost daily, and everybody dropped what they were doing and dashed to and fro in frenzy, practising air-raid drills in case of an attack. America and South Korea were about to launch a nuclear strike, we were told. War could break out at any minute. The thought of nuclear war terrified me. My mother panicked and gave a lot of stuff away. She gave all our spare blankets and pillows to Uncle Poor and his family on the collective farm.

The boys dug frantically with shovels and the girls shifted the earth. I hated every minute of this. If war started while we were at school, several hundred students were supposed to hide in the warren of tunnels. I was worried that our amateur engineering might prove disastrous, and bury us alive. I was sceptical, too, of whether these tunnels were deep enough to protect us from a nuclear strike. Years later I discovered that the propaganda had an element of truth. The United States had actually been considering air strikes against our country’s nuclear plants.

After one of these tedious and exhausting days of digging and air-raid drills, I went to my friend Sun-i’s house after school. She was in the tight bunch of friends I hung out with, but this was the first time I’d been to her home. Usually she came to mine.

‘Shall we eat something?’ I said. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘I’m not sure what we’ve got.’ She sounded vague.

‘Anything.’

‘We don’t have much.’

This annoyed me.
You’re always getting snacks at my house.
‘I don’t need a meal,’ I said.

Sun-i hesitated. She was embarrassed.

‘Come here,’ she said, leading me into the kitchen. Four pots sat on the stove. She slid the lid off one. ‘Look. I can’t give you this.’

Inside the pot were thick dark-green objects. She put the lid back on before I could ask what they were, but I could tell it wasn’t normal food. On the way home, I realized they might have been corn stalks.

Why would her mother be cooking such a thing instead of rice?

My mother came home from work looking tired and distracted. She hadn’t been sleeping much since my father had died and had more lines beneath her eyes and around her mouth. It had been months since I’d seen her smile. But at least she was able to provide for us through her small business deals. We had food and money. Her job at the local government bureau also meant that she had access to farm produce managed by her office. This gave her an opportunity for graft that she was expected to exercise. Soon after Kim Il-sung’s death the government had stopped paying salaries. It continued to give out ration coupons through the workplace, but these were becoming increasingly worthless. For some reason there were fewer and fewer goods to exchange for them.

She’d brought home a letter received by one of her colleagues. It was from the woman’s sister who lived in North Hamgyong Province, a neighbouring province to the east of ours. My mother wanted to show it to us.

‘I need you and Min-ho to know something. People are having a hard time. You ask me for this and complain we don’t have that. Not everyone has what we have.’

She handed me the letter.

Dear Sister,

By the time you read this, the five of us will no longer exist in this world. We have not eaten for a few weeks. We are emaciated, though recently our bodies have become bloated. We are waiting to die. My one hope before I go is to eat some corn cake.

My first response was puzzlement.

Why hadn’t they eaten for weeks? This was one of the most prosperous countries in the world. Every evening the news showed factories and farms producing in abundance, well-fed people enjoying leisure time, and the department stores in Pyongyang filled with goods. And why was this woman’s last wish to eat corn cake – ‘poor man’s cake’? Shouldn’t she want to see her sister one last time?

The realization was slow in coming.

I thought of how offhand I’d been with my friend Sun-i because she hadn’t offered me a snack at her house. I was mortified.

Her family was struggling to find food.

A few days later, I witnessed famine for the first time.

I was at the market outside Wiyeon Station in Hyesan and saw a woman lying on her side on the ground with a baby in her arms. She was young, in her twenties. The baby, a boy, was about two years old, and staring at his mother. They were pale and skeletal, and dressed in rags. The woman’s face was caked with filth and her hair badly matted. She looked sick. To my astonishment people were walking past her and the baby as if they were invisible.

I could not ignore her. I put a 100-won note on the baby’s lap. I thought it was hopeless to give it to the mother. Her eyes were clouded and not focusing. She wasn’t seeing me. I guessed she was close to death. The money would have bought food for a couple of days.

‘I rescued a baby today,’ I told my mother when I got home. I thought she would be proud to know that I had cared while others had walked by.

‘What do you mean?’

I told her what I had done.

She dropped what she was doing and turned to me, highly annoyed. ‘Are you completely stupid? How can a baby buy anything? Some thief will have snatched that note straight off him. You should have just bought food for them.’

She was right, and I felt responsible.

After that I started thinking a lot about charity. Sharing what we had made us good communists, but at the same time it seemed futile. People had so little, and had to take care of their own families first. I could spare the 100-won note I’d given to the baby and his mother, but I realized it would have solved their problem only for a couple of days. This thought depressed me utterly.

A shadow began to fall across Hyesan. Beggars were appearing everywhere, especially around the markets. This was a sight I’d never seen in our country before. There were vagrant children, too. At first, only in twos and threes, but soon many of them, migrating to Hyesan from the countryside. Their parents had perished of hunger, leaving them to fend for themselves, without relatives. They were nicknamed
kotchebi
(‘flowering swallows’) and, like birds, they seemed to gather in flocks. One of their survival tricks was to distract a market vendor while accomplices snatched the food and ran off. In a horrible twist of irony they were regularly seen scavenging in the dirt for grains, peel or gristle – exactly how we’d been told the children in South Korea lived. At school, children whose parents were struggling to feed them came less regularly, and then stopped coming altogether. My class shrank in size by a third. Some of the teachers stopped coming, too. They were making a living as market traders instead.

Food was not the only thing in short supply. There was no fertilizer for crops. In the villages children had to bring a quota of their own excrement to school for use as fertilizer. Families locked their outhouses in case thieves stole what little they had. There was no fuel. The steel and lumber mills fell idle. Factory chimneys stopped puffing smoke, and the city streets fell silent and empty during the day. The larches and pines that made the foothills of the mountains so beautiful began to disappear. The landscape was being denuded of trees. People were foraging for fuel as a freezing wind swept down from Manchuria with the onset of winter. Power cuts became more frequent, to the point where the electricity hardly came on at all. To light our home in the evening my mother made a lamp from a pot of diesel with a strip of cotton as a wick. This gave off such a dirty smoke that Min-ho and I would have a circle of soot around our mouths.

One cold morning early in winter, a few weeks before the river froze, I took a walk in the sunshine along the riverside path and saw what looked like a rag gliding in the slow current. Then I saw that the rag had an upturned human face. The eyes were open. I watched in horror as it passed, heading downriver past my house. Just before dawn, before people on the Chinese bank would notice, the border guards had been retrieving corpses from the water and covering them with straw. They were people who had tried to cross somewhere upriver and were too weak to make it. The current could be fast after it had rained in the mountains.

In early 1996, not long after my sixteenth birthday, I saw a crowd gathered around a middle-aged man at a market outside the city. He was giving a speech, speaking with a Korean-Chinese accent. He had a pot belly and a good-quality padded coat. He looked well off. I guessed he had come from China for the day to visit relatives.

‘Why has this suffering fallen upon our people?’ he said. Tears were rolling down his plump cheeks. ‘People are starving and dying. How could this happen to our country?’

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a wad of blue Chinese ten-yuan notes. An instant tension ran through the crowd. He began handing the notes out to everyone and anyone. As if summoned by a whistle, beggars in rags materialized from everywhere, holding out their hands. The man was surrounded in every direction by outstretched arms. He gave away all his notes.

His question stuck in my mind.

What exactly was happening? There had been no war. In fact everyone had forgotten all about the nuclear strike for which we’d spent so much time digging and practising air-raid drills. Famine had appeared out of nowhere like a plague.

The official explanation for the ‘arduous march’, as the propaganda obliquely called the famine, was the Yankee-backed UN economic sanctions, coupled with crop failures and freak flooding that had made the situation worse. When I heard this I believed that Kim Jong-il was doing his very best for us in terrible circumstances. What would the people do without him? The true reason, which I did not learn until years later, and which was known to very few people in North Korea, had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the refusal of the new Russian government to continue subsidizing us with fuel and food.

Kim Jong-il was now in charge of the country. We listened to a television news anchor quavering with emotion as she described how our Dear Leader was eating only simple meals of rice balls and potatoes in sympathy with the people’s suffering. But on the screen he looked as portly and well fed as ever. As a distraction from the economy, which seemed not to be functioning at all, news reports showed him endlessly inspecting the nation’s defences and army bases. A war for unification with the South would solve everything, people were saying.

I could tell from their accents that a lot of the beggars in the city were not from Hyesan – they had come from North Hamgyong and South Hamgyong provinces. We’d heard that the situation there was very bad. I did not realize how bad until I made a visit to Aunt Pretty in Hamhung that spring of 1996.

It was a journey through the landscape of hell.

Spring is the leanest season in North Korea, when food stocks from the previous harvest are exhausted and the year’s crops have not yet grown. The land was bare and brown. It looked blighted, cursed. On every hill, trees had been felled, and for miles around individual people dotted the open countryside, roaming listlessly like living dead, foraging for food, aimless; or they sat on their haunches along the side of the track, doing nothing, waiting for nothing.