The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (16 page)

Before they took me on my first night out in Shenyang, they suggested I assumed a new name. This was for my own protection. The name they concocted for me was Chae Mi-ran. I liked it. It seemed fun to use an alias. When my uncle and aunt’s friends dropped by, I was introduced as Mi-ran. I was visiting from Yanbian, they were told, the Korean region of China where many people speak Korean as a first language and may not speak Mandarin so well. The friends gave a knowing ‘Aah’ and accepted this explanation.

Shenyang was a revelation. In North Korea, streets are dark and deserted at night. Here, the city came alive at sunset. The sidewalks of Taiyuan Street heaved with shoppers and young people my own age on a night out, boys and girls mixing together, stylish and laughing. Music boomed and throbbed from cars and bars. Everything seemed suffused with a kind of super-reality, as if I’d come from a world of black and white into one of Technicolor. It was magical – an illusion enhanced by the myriad sparkling lights in every window display, restaurant and lobby, and on the fir trees that stood everywhere. Aunt Sang-hee explained that they were Christmas trees, a Western custom that had caught on in China. Each evening we dined somewhere new. ‘What’re you in the mood for?’ my uncle would say, clapping his hands together. ‘Chinese, Korean, Japanese, European? Or something else?’ One restaurant had fish swimming in a tank illuminated an electric blue. I chose the one I wanted to eat. Menus overwhelmed me with choice. I ate ice cream every night.

Aunt Sang-hee showed me how to work the karaoke machine in the apartment. At first I sang South Korean ballads with the volume turned low and the door closed, until she yelled from the next room: ‘Turn it up, I like that one.’ In this country, there was no secret music.

After that they took me, along with a large crowd of their friends, to a noisy karaoke bar, another new experience for me. I could not believe I was singing my beloved ‘Rocky Island’ in public, and got a round of applause. I had never enjoyed a night out so much.

When, at the end of four or five days, Aunt Sang-hee said: ‘Can’t you stay a while longer?’ I took no persuading.

During the day, while my uncle and aunt were at work, I had to stay inside. But even that was fascinating. I could freely watch any television I wanted without having to close the curtains or keep the volume down or worry about the neighbours. This was pure freedom.

Before I knew it, a month had shot by and I had celebrated my eighteenth birthday in Shenyang. I could not delay my return any longer. My uncle said he would drive me back to Changbai. These weeks had been such a whirl of discovery and enjoyment that I had given little thought to the implications of turning eighteen.

The day before our departure, the home phone rang in the kitchen. My uncle answered it. His face tensed, then without a word he passed the phone to me.

Behind the crackle and hiss on the line the voice was faint. ‘Min-young, listen to me …’

It was my mother.

‘Don’t come back. We’re in trouble.’

I didn’t know how she was calling. We didn’t have a home phone. She would not have called from her workplace because the
Bowibu
monitored the line. Wherever she was calling from, it was dangerous. She was speaking quickly. She wasn’t angry; she had no time to tell me off, or for any chitchat.

‘The day after you left, they started a census for the next elections,’ she said.

I felt myself break out in a sweat.

Every so often the authorities registered voters in order to find out who was missing and why. I had turned eighteen and was old enough to vote in North Korea’s ‘elections’, which always returned Kim Jong-il, with a hundred per cent approval.

‘The inspectors wanted to know where you were. The
banjang
was with them. I said you were visiting Aunt Pretty in Hamhung. The
banjang
doesn’t know it’s not true, but you know how gossip gets around. There’s already a rumour that you’re in China.’

It was Chang-ho, my friend the border guard, who’d told her where I’d gone. ‘She’ll be back soon,’ he’d said cheerfully. He’d always had more looks than brains. My mother had almost fainted. For the next few days she’d been in an agony of nerves. She knew she had to do something. So a week after telling the census inspectors I’d gone to Hamhung, she reported me missing to the police.

‘The rumour that you’ve been in China may be too strong for me to take care of if you suddenly reappear. You’re young. You have your future ahead of you. I don’t want you to live your life with this stain on your record.’

What did that mean? That I could not go back at all?

Her voice was tense, urgent.

‘Our situation will be dangerous for a while. Don’t contact us. The neighbours are watching us. We’ll sell the house and move. I don’t know where, but you know what I mean.’

I understood. My mother and Min-ho would have to move to a neighbourhood where people didn’t know us and would accept the story that the family had a missing daughter.

‘I have to go,’ she said abruptly.

There was a click as she hung up. The line went dead. The call had lasted under a minute.

I handed the phone back to my uncle in a daze. I was perspiring as if I’d been for a hard run. There was something desperate about the way she’d ended the call, without even a goodbye.

When I told my uncle and aunt what she’d said they looked at each other.

‘Well, then, you should stay in China,’ my aunt said gravely. They were taken aback. They knew I had nowhere to go.

I didn’t want to be a burden, I said, but they reassured me. Things would work out, somehow. My aunt turned to stare out of the window. They were still digesting this news.

I am ashamed to admit that my first emotion, when I was alone in my room, was relief. I was just glad that I didn’t have to go back. I thought life in Shenyang was a marvellous vacation.

Over the years to come, when my loneliness would become unbearable, and the full realization of the trouble I had brought upon my mother sank in, the memory of that relief would make me so guilty that I would lie awake at night. If I’d known that when reality began to bite, and I began to miss my mother, Min-ho, and my uncles and aunts in Hyesan so much that the feeling was almost a physical pain, I would have disobeyed her and gone straight back to Hyesan.

Now that I was to stay indefinitely in China, I had to learn Mandarin. And I had the best teacher – necessity. You can study a language for years at school, but nothing helps you succeed like need, and mine was clear, and urgent. If I didn’t want the apartment to become my prison, I had to become as fluent in Mandarin as any Chinese girl my age.

My uncle started me off with a kindergarten book that I studied alone during the day and practised in conversations with him and my aunt at night. I soon progressed to children’s stories. I watched hours of television daily. As China has so many ethnic groups for whom Mandarin is a second language, most TV dramas and news had subtitles in Chinese characters. Not only was it more interesting to learn this way, but I didn’t have to limit myself to kids’ shows because I already had a basic grasp of characters, having learned them at school. I had my father to thank for that. Back then I hadn’t seen the point of learning them, but my father had been adamant. As a result, Chinese characters became one of my best subjects.

Being free from all other distractions, I made fast progress in basic Mandarin. Recognizing a word in a subtitle that I had just learned was always a
Yes!
moment of satisfaction for me.

For six months I did little else apart from sneaking out for the occasional walk, and my days became monotonous. Each morning I felt more and more homesick. Eventually the day came when I stared out at the rain, seeing the other apartment towers disappear up into cloud like unfinished sketches, and it dawned on me.

I will never go home
.

Over the next few days this realization took such a hold that I thought I was losing my sanity. It was a disaster, and I had not seen it coming.
I’m never going to see my mother or Min-ho again.

My mind’s eye endlessly reran the taxi ride along the river and that final second when I’d seen my house through the trees.
Why didn’t I ask the driver to pull over and let me out?
I couldn’t stop thinking of that last phone call from my mother. How desperate she’d sounded, and we didn’t even say goodbye.

I was trapped in a foreign country with no identity. My aunt and uncle were being good to me, but our family connection was so distant it was beginning to make me uncomfortable. I would not be able to trespass on their kindness for ever. The day would come when they’d want me to go.

What if I were to go home now?

No, I couldn’t. I had come too far. It was too late.

My cousin had left a guitar behind when he moved away. I started playing the songs I used to sing in North Korea. These would make me cry. I cried every day, so much that it became impossible to conceal from my uncle and aunt. They were sympathetic but I could sense they were getting fed up with me. I didn’t blame them.

At about this time, I had the first nightmare. I dreamed that my mother had been arrested by the
Bowibu
and sent to a labour camp, one of the political zones of no return, and had died there. Min-ho was now an orphan and a beggar. I saw him – so vividly in my dream – walking alone along a desolate dirt track. He was in rags and barefoot. His features had turned mean and he was obsessed with food, like a feral dog. I felt paralysed with guilt. The dream changed scene. Before she died, my mother had written to me. It began:
My dear daughter, I’m so sorry that I went first and that I couldn’t take care of Min-ho …

I woke up gasping for air. When I realized it was a dream I started to sob and became hysterical. The noise woke my aunt. She ran in to see what was wrong, and held me as I cried. It had been so lucid, this dream, that I was convinced something very bad had happened. There was no way to know. The next day I was subdued. I felt bereaved.

The following night I had the second nightmare. I had sneaked over the frozen river and was walking alone through a deserted Hyesan. It was night-time, and nothing was lit. It was like a city of the dead. I went to my house. Through the window I could make out my mother and Min-ho huddled together. My mother was weeping and Min-ho was comforting her. They had no money and no food. It was all my fault. I could only watch. If I entered the gate the neighbours would see me and inform on me. I walked to the river to find Chang-ho. I felt guilty about him, too. I saw him patrolling the bank but I couldn’t approach him, so I hid in some trees and watched from a distance. Suddenly,
Bowibu
agents emerged from the shadows all around me. I ran for my life back across the ice to China, with the sounds of whistles and police dogs behind me. Then I woke up.

These two dreams would replay over and over again. The same scenes played on a loop, hundreds of times, night after night.

Any feeling that I was living a liberated life of excitement and discovery in Shenyang had vanished. From that summer of 1998, I had entered a long lonely valley. I deserved my fate. I had brought this upon myself.

If the chance came now I would do it
, I thought.
I would go back.

By now I knew that North Korea was not the greatest country on earth. Not one of the Korean-Chinese friends of my uncle and aunt had a good word to say about the place, and the Chinese media seemed to regard it as a relic, an embarrassment. Shenyang’s newspapers openly lampooned Kim Jong-il.

I didn’t care about any of that. My country was wherever my mother and Min-ho lived. It was where my memories were from. It was where I’d been happy. The very things I’d regarded as symbols of our backwardness I now missed the most. Burning
yontan
, kerosene lamps, even Korea Central Television with its Pioneer ensembles playing accordions. The simplicity of life. One thing was for sure – I’d never known true misery until now.

One morning when my uncle and aunt had gone to work I called Mr Ahn’s number in Changbai, hoping he could pass a message to my mother. His phone was no longer in service. I got a dead signal each time I tried. In the end I called his next-door neighbour, Mr Chang, the other trader my mother knew.

He was very angry to receive my call.

‘Why are you calling me?’

‘I want to send a message to my mother.’

‘What are you talking about? I don’t know you.’

‘Yes, you—’

‘Don’t ever call this number again,’ he shouted, and hung up. I thought perhaps he’d been drunk and so I tried again the next day. This time, the line was dead.

My lifelines to Hyesan had been cut.

Aunt Sang-hee became desperate to pull me out of my despair. I was becoming a serious worry to her. I had no role in life, and she could see I was becoming depressed. She began to hatch a plan that she thought would be the solution to my situation.

I knew nothing about it until one evening when the doorbell rang. I was in my bedroom, as usual, playing sad songs on the guitar. She knocked softly on the door, and told me I had a visitor.

My heart leapt. My depressed mind was making all kinds of irrational connections. I thought maybe it was someone from Hyesan.

I followed her into the living room.

A tall young man I did not recognize was standing on the rug, holding a bunch of pink azaleas. He was in his mid-twenties and looking sweaty and ill at ease in a jacket and tie.

My aunt beamed. ‘Mi-ran,’ she said, using my alias, ‘this is Geun-soo.’

‘It’s my pleasure to meet you,’ he said, using the honorific form of address. He bowed, and presented me with the azaleas, but his eyes did not meet mine.

Geun-soo, my aunt explained, was the son of her good friend Mrs Jang, a member of her Korean-Chinese social circle. He was gangly and so nondescript I’m not sure I could have picked him out in a crowd. He had the sallow complexion of someone whose pursuits all took place indoors, and an adolescent sheen to his skin.