The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (19 page)

I could picture her gesturing furiously to the sisters.
It’s her.

I thought she would be hissing with fury, but her voice was cool and controlled. To my great surprise she said: ‘Please come back, Mi-ran. For my son’s sake. He’s not the same. He’s been very depressed since you left.’

Geun-soo is depressed over me?
‘Could I talk to him?’

He was weeping when he came to the phone. He sounded drunk and couldn’t form his words properly.

‘Please come back,’ he said. ‘I still have the honeymoon tickets. We can go away.’

These were the first strong sentiments I’d ever heard from him. I felt very sorry for him, and dismayed. I’d had to abandon him before he was able to figure out how he felt about me. But it was too late. I could not go back. The clearest desire in my mind was to reconnect with my family. He and his mother would be a barrier to that.

I kept saying over and over how sorry I was. I had humiliated him and insulted his family.

When the call ended, I slumped against the wall next to the pay phone and buried my face in my hands. I had brought great misfortune upon Geun-soo.

Our Respected Father Leader commands that we respect our elders and honour our families. I have noticed that Comrade Mi-ran does nothing but hurt the people closest to her. Would she agree that she is a person of bad character?

Yes. That’s what I was. A bad person.

I had no one to talk to, no one who might have told me that, for my own wellbeing, the choice I had made did not make me bad.

Instead, this scathing self-assessment sank in, and a part of me turned cold. When I was crying in my uncle’s apartment, missing my mother, my heart was there. But now something inside me had hardened and the tears had stopped.

I no longer liked myself.

I swore that I would do penance for the harm I had done Geun-soo. For weeks I thought about how I might do this. In the end, I decided that my punishment would be never to marry. I would not add to the hurt and insult I had caused him by marrying someone else.

Whenever people asked when I would marry, I got into the habit of saying: ‘Never. It’s not important to me.’

In January 2001, two sleek young men came into the restaurant at lunchtime. They were friendly and asked me about Shenyang. They had perfect teeth, I noticed.

That day we were short-staffed so I was waiting tables. I was laying out
banchan
dishes in front of them when one of them spoke in a low voice.

‘You wouldn’t know any North Koreans, would you?’

I avoided their eyes. ‘Why do you want to know?’

They put their business cards on the table and told me they were filmmakers from one of South Korea’s main television stations.

‘We’re making a documentary,’ one of them said. ‘We want to find a North Korean defector trying to reach South Korea. We’ll pay the brokers’ fees to make sure they get there, and any other expenses.’

I was taken aback. The North and the South were mortal enemies. The Korean War had ended in 1953 with a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. The two countries were still at war.

‘How can a North Korean go to South Korea?’ I said. This was the first I’d heard of such a thing.

‘Many come these days,’ the man said.

I told them I’d ask around. I walked away intrigued.

Am I the one you’re looking for?

Each day the two men came in for lunch. I was seriously considering telling them my secret, but my instinct was urging extreme caution. This could be a trap. Before I did anything rash I needed some facts. I told Ji-woo, my dorm friend, what the South Koreans had said to me, sounding as casual as I could. What she said in response came as a massive surprise. South Korea considered all North Koreans to be South Korean citizens, she said. Any who succeeded in reaching Seoul were given a South Korean passport and quite a large allowance to help them resettle.

This got me thinking. I knew from my uncle and aunt that South Korea was not the ‘hell on earth’ portrayed by the Party’s propaganda. My uncle had visited the South on business and told me it was even richer and freer than China. I thought he was exaggerating. In truth I had given very little thought to South Korea. I had been so focused on learning Mandarin that I had not even watched South Korean soap operas on the cable channels. I also still believed that the North’s problems were all down to the Yankee-backed UN sanctions. Going to pro-Yankee South Korea would be a betrayal of my own country, wouldn’t it? What’s more, I remembered that on the rare occasions someone had defected
to
North Korea, the Party propagandists had held a press conference. If I defected to the South, wouldn’t I have to do the same, in front of a bank of microphones and flashing cameras? That could get my family into terrible trouble.

I was still undecided when, after a week, the two South Koreans stopped coming to the restaurant. They must have found what they were looking for.

Uncle Opium had once told me you get three chances in life. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just let a major one go flying past my ears.

That evening I went on a night out with the dorm girls. We ate skewered lamb from a market food stall, then went to a café for bubble-milk tea. The girls chatted about their private lives, family worries, boyfriend problems. Each one of them wanted a better life. One of them, a Korean-Chinese girl from Yanbian, gave me a sideways look and said: ‘You never say much about yourself. You’re not an orphan, are you?’

For months I had dreaded the curiosity of others, but after the missed opportunity with the filmmakers I was feeling reckless. It was my extreme caution that had caused me to miss the chance. I was sick of lying.

‘No, not an orphan,’ I said. I had a habit of pausing before I spoke, to give myself a second to weigh the consequences. This time I came straight out with it. ‘I’m from North Korea.’

The girls looked at each other. Ji-woo, the most savvy of the group, said she’d had no idea. Suddenly they were intensely interested. So I told them my story. We were in the café until closing time.

For the first time I became curious about other fugitive North Koreans in Shenyang. So many were in hiding that every few months the police launched a city-wide sweep to catch them and send them back. At a birthday party for one of the waitresses, I heard a girl whose Mandarin was so halting that I guessed she was North Korean. I introduced myself. Gradually and discreetly, I got to know several other North Korean girls, all of them, like me, hiding in plain sight.

The girl I’d met at the birthday party was called Soo-jin. She had the oval face, large eyes and full, bow-shaped red lips considered very beautiful in North Korea. She too was a waitress. I began to enjoy long chats with her on the phone once or twice a week. She was living in Shenyang with her South Korean boyfriend.
Living with a South Korean boyfriend.
I was scandalized when she told me that, and thrilled.

But after a few weeks her calls suddenly stopped. When I called her phone, I got a
number discontinued
tone. I sensed disaster in it.

Six months later I thought I spotted Soo-jin in the street in Koreatown after dark, but I wasn’t sure. I called her name, and a face turned toward me with a hunted look, like an animal caught ferreting in trash. It was her. Her features had grown thin and drawn. I could see her shoulder bones poking through her T-shirt.

Far from being happy to see me, her eyes were darting about, as if she thought she was being followed. She said the police had come to her apartment and asked for her ID. She didn’t have one. They arrested her and processed her at the Xita Road Police Station, then deported her back to North Korea. She was imprisoned for three months in a
Bowibu
holding camp. Hygiene was non-existent and each meal consisted of ten kernels of corn. New arrivals quickly contracted diarrhoea, which, with starvation rations, killed many in a matter of days.

On her release she was made to sign a document vowing never to escape again. She knew that if she was caught a second time, she would not survive the punishment. Scars from kicks and beatings were livid on her legs. She said that China was too dangerous for her now. She was determined to get to South Korea.

Soo-jin was desperate to keep a low profile. She was convinced that she had been betrayed by a mutual North Korean friend of ours in Shenyang called Choon-hi, who she believed had been let off by the Chinese police in exchange for becoming an informer.

Soo-jin squeezed my hand. ‘Soon-hyang, be careful.’

I watched her go. I never saw her again.

What Soo-jin told me spooked me and made me paranoid about informers. How many knew I was North Korean? I kept going over and over this. Whom had I told?

Even then, I didn’t see disaster coming.

A week later, the receptionist at the restaurant called my cellphone at about ten in the morning. It was my day off and I was in the dormitory. Two good-looking young men were in the restaurant, she said, sounding upbeat. ‘They’ve asked for you by name.’

My heart leapt. No one ever asked for me by name, but I had given my name to the two South Korean filmmakers.

‘Ask them to wait,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right there.’

I put on some makeup, and rushed to the restaurant.

At that time of morning there were few customers. The receptionist pointed to a table. Two men I did not recognize stood up.

‘Soon-hyang?’ one of them said.

‘Yes.’

They opened their jackets to reveal their warrant badges.

‘Police. You’re coming with us.’

The two plainclothes officers escorted me outside to an unmarked BMW. I felt hazily detached from reality, as if this were some bad daydream. They did not cuff me. They seemed relaxed, as if they’d done this many times. One of them was extraordinarily handsome I noticed, like a movie actor. A third man was sitting in the driver’s seat. I sat between the two men in the back.

‘Where are we going?’ I said.

The handsome one answered. ‘Xita Road Station.’

The car’s air con was chilling me. My teeth began to chatter.
It’s over
, I thought. There was no possible way out of this.

As we sped through the familiar streets of Xita I thought of the awful trouble my family would be in once the
Bowibu
found out I’d been in China. It was my mother and Min-ho I was fearful for, not for myself.

I deserved this. I had done this to myself.

I linked my fingers in my lap, and for the first time in my life, I prayed. I belonged to no faith, so I prayed to the spirits of my ancestors.
If this is another nightmare, let me wake up.
I prayed to the spirit of my dear father.
If you can, please help me now
.

The car pulled over in front of the station. The officers walked either side of me into a reception area lit by fluorescent lighting. It was busy, with people in uniform and civilian clothes coming and going. To the left I saw what looked like a temporary holding cell with floor-to-ceiling bars. At least thirty people were crammed into the space, leaning against the wall or sitting on the floor. Men and women together, silent, with blank, resigned faces. Some of them were very thin. They stared at me. They
looked
North Korean. I felt no pity for them. I felt nothing.

In a few minutes I’ll be joining you
.

We passed a desk where a one- or two-month-old baby lay wrapped in a blanket. It was crying, and unattended.

My legs turned to straw. The two policemen led me upstairs.

On the second floor, we entered a large, bright conference room. Twenty or so police officers in pale-blue shirts stood about, leaning against the wall. All watched me as I came in. The handsome officer politely offered me a chair facing a desk, then sat behind it between two other male officials. The scene was surreal, and like a dream. Relaxed, yet menacing.

The handsome officer introduced himself as Inspector Xu. He was to be my interrogator. It was happening here. I was surrounded.

Focus,
I told myself.
Pay attention only to what is crucial
–
the three men behind the desk.
Forget the others watching me.

Inspector Xu was not the only one asking the questions. The other two also took turns to interrogate me in Mandarin.

What is your family name? Where were you born? Your parents’ names? Their occupations? Their precise address? The names of your siblings?

I told them I was the daughter of Uncle Jung-gil and Aunt Sang-hee in Shenyang and gave all their details.

‘I need your family’s home phone number,’ one of the officials said.

Sirens went off in my head. I could not risk them phoning my uncle and aunt.

‘We don’t have one now. My parents cancelled it because they’re staying in South Korea for a while.’

Which elementary school did you attend? What was the headmaster’s name?

My mind dredged up every shred of information I could recall from conversations with Geun-soo and his sisters about their schooling in Shenyang.

Your secondary school? Which one?

My heart was beating wildly but I forced myself to remain calm. My body went into a kind of emergency operating mode. It was almost as if I was not there.

They’re watching to see if I’m lying
.
Don’t show them
.
Speak clearly and with confidence
. Nervousness began to show in my fingers. I was clutching my hands together in my lap. They would notice that. I stilled my fingers.

Back to your parents. What is your father’s date of birth? Your mother’s? And then, casually, as if asking the day of the week: ‘When is Kim Il-sung’s birthday?’

April 15th. A question any North Korean could answer without thinking.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I said.

The questioning moved on to a new phase. Inspector Xu asked me when I would get married. I thought there might be a trap in the question.