The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (20 page)

‘Not for ten years yet,’ I said. My laugh sounded fake. ‘I’m too young.’

The police standing behind me observed the whole scene in silence. No one came into the room; no one left.

Inspector Xu was watching me carefully, twirling his pen in his fingers.

Next he slid a copy of the
Shenyang Daily
across the desk, and told me to start reading the first article. It was about a traffic pile-up on the Shen-Da Expressway.

By this time, my Mandarin sounded natural. I was fairly sure that I spoke without a trace of a North Korean accent.

After a minute or two, he said: ‘Enough.’

I noticed that so far nobody had entered any of the answers I had given into the computer on the desk.

They’ve got doubts. They think I may be Chinese.

Next was a written test in Chinese. One of the interrogators dictated from the newspaper, and stood behind me as I wrote down his words.

When I’d done that one of them said: ‘Where’s your ID?’

‘It’s at home.’ When Geun-soo had shown me the ID card his family had made for me, I had memorized the ID number. I gave it to them. The ID system was still paper-based. Checking the number would require a call to another station, which would have to retrieve a file.

If they think I’m North Korean, they’ll start checking properly now. Then that’s the end
.

Instead, the atmosphere in the room lightened. The suspicion was draining from their faces. Inspector Xu smiled for the first time. ‘So, when are you really getting married?’

I laughed again. ‘When the best offer comes along.’

One of the interrogators flipped his notebook shut. I heard him say to the other: ‘False report.’

So, someone had reported me.

Inspector Xu stood up. ‘You’re free to go,’ he said with a sweep of his arm toward the door. ‘Sorry to take up your time. We had to follow procedure.’

I walked to the door in a daze, under the eyes of all the police in the room, and just like in a dream, I expected to hear: ‘Ah, one last thing …’

The door closed behind me. I rushed down the stairs, across the reception area, and past the holding cell. I could not bear to look at the people locked in there.

I walked out into the sunshine and the bustle of the street. Once I was several blocks away from the station I slowed and stopped for a minute on the sidewalk. It was a clear, warm morning. Business was carrying on as usual in Xita. Pedestrians flowed around me. I looked up. An airplane was tracing its way across the blue, like a tiny silver minnow.

Thank you, my dear father, with all my heart. Thank you for making me study Chinese for all that time at school.

Chinese characters take years to master. That final test had dispelled the last doubts in their minds.

My father had saved me.

I knew now that time was running out for me in Shenyang. I could not stay. It was too dangerous. Until I figured out where to go, I would hide. I would move out of the dorm. But to where? Nowhere in the city was safe from the police.

As I walked my relief began turning into depression. I was already hiding beneath so many lies that I hardly knew who I was any more. I was becoming a non-person. The experience I’d just had was deeply dehumanizing. A police bureaucracy, with its correct procedures and trick questions, and inspectors in pressed shirts, thought it reasonable and right to send people from my country to a
Bowibu
torture cell for beatings with wire cables.

I clasped my hands to my head.
How could I have been so stupid, telling anyone I was from North Korea?
Now I had no one I could trust. And nowhere I could feel protected.

The moment I thought that, an idea occurred to me.

If the net for catching escaped North Koreans was cast from the Xita Road Police Station, then I would move right next to it. No one would imagine that a fugitive would live next to the very place where the round-ups were planned. The darkest spot is right beneath the candle.

A few days later I rented a one-room apartment next door to the Xita Road Police Station. In fact, the distance from the entrance of my new apartment building to the station was about five steps. From my window, I could see some of the police from the interrogation room coming and going in their dark-blue uniforms. I was so close that I figured they wouldn’t bother with my block, even on one of their most thorough round-ups.

Two weeks after I had moved there, I was returning home after a long day at the restaurant. I was so tired it was an effort to climb the stairs. I felt in the bottom of my bag for the keys to my door. The stairwell had no light.

Suddenly I heard the sound of a rapid movement in the darkness to my left, as if something were rushing toward me. Before I could react, a massive blow struck the back of my head. The explosion in my ears stunned my brain.

My vision went blank, then I blacked out.

I opened my eyes to a diffuse white light. I was lying on my side on a bed. Pain pulsed from the back of my head. I felt nauseous. A soft-spoken female voice asked me to look at her. I turned my eyes slightly and saw a lady in a green surgical mask. The gash in my head required ten stitches, she said. I was being given an anaesthetic and would be going under for about half an hour.

If I don’t wake up no one will know who I am,
I thought.

The girl with many names and no identity.

My eyes began to droop.

It was a couple of days before I could piece together what had happened. My neighbour in the apartment block had heard a noise in the stairwell. She found me lying on the concrete floor. A widening pool of blood was flowing from the back of my skull. The attacker had smashed a full one-litre beer bottle over my head and had run off.

Someone had been waiting for me in the dark, intending to attack me with such violence that the blow might have been fatal. Whoever it was didn’t take my wallet, or the keys out of my hand to rob my apartment.

I had been very lucky that my attacker had not drunk the beer first, the hospital staff said. The glass of an empty bottle would have done far more damage. They urged me to report to the police as soon as possible. I said I would, but I had no intention of talking to the police.

My old dorm friend, Ji-woo, thought the family of my jilted ex-fiancé was behind the attack. Mrs Jang might have been seeking to avenge the family’s honour for my humiliation of Geun-soo before the wedding.

This thought troubled me very much. But the more I considered it, the less likely it seemed. The manner of the attack, and the choice of weapon – a one-litre bottle of beer! – wasn’t something the family would stoop to. I credited Mrs Jang with more class.

The timing, just two weeks after my police interrogation, suggested that it was more likely to be connected to the informer who’d told the police I was a North Korean, and who provided them with my name and place of work. This is speculation, but the informer might have suffered consequences for wasting police time with a ‘false’ report, and was taking revenge.

Once I was on the mend, I went back to work at the restaurant, but I was no longer enjoying the job. The comfort of my routine had been shattered. I was now mistrustful of everyone. I became paranoid whenever a customer tried to chat with me.

I missed my family more than ever. I longed for my mother’s affection. I wanted to cry in her arms after what had happened to me. I longed for Min-ho’s company. There was not an hour of the day when I did not think about them. Before the police interrogation, I had started to make friends in Shenyang, but now I kept to myself. Once again, I was alone.

In my new neighbourhood, I found myself using the same laundry as some of the policemen. Sometimes I saw the handsome Inspector Xu. He didn’t recognize me. One of the regulars in the laundry was a Korean-Chinese officer who always smiled at me. I tried to think whether he’d been in the background when I’d been interrogated, but I wasn’t sure and I couldn’t ask. He seemed nice. His name was Shin Jin-su and he held the rank of sergeant. He was a little older than me. Not good-looking, but impressive in his uniform
.
One evening in the laundry he asked if I’d like to have dinner. My instinct was to smile and decline, but after all that had happened in the last few weeks, I was frightened and cynical. A voice in my head said:
Why not?
A policeman ally could be useful.

We began dating. It was the autumn of 2001. Our dates were nothing fancy. We’d go to a McDonald’s or a KFC. One evening, he seemed tired but in high spirits. ‘I’m exhausted,’ he said. ‘And starving.’ He was stuffing a Big Mac and fries into his mouth and wiping the grease from his lips with the back of his hand.

‘Why?’

‘Rounding up North Koreans since dawn.’ His mouth was full. ‘We caught so many I had to skip lunch.’

He described how some of them cried and begged when they were cornered, and seemed to think I’d find this as funny as he did. ‘Please don’t send me back,’ he said, putting on a high-pitched North Korean accent.

I had to control my face to hide my anger.
The woman you’re looking at is one of them, you bastard
.

I knew I had no real affection for him, that I was using him for protection. But far from being clever, I realized I was courting danger.

I would have to end my relationship with Police Sergeant Shin Jin-su. But while I sat there listening to him boast about his role in the round-ups, it gave me satisfaction to know that I finally had a North Korean plan of my own.

Almost four years had passed since that final call from my mother. On each anniversary of that date a valve in my heart would open and flood me with sadness. But as the fourth anniversary approached, in the winter of 2001, I had hope for the first time. Four years of frugal living meant that I had saved enough to pay a broker to find my family in Hyesan. Even if a reunion with them could not be arranged, I was desperate to get a message to them. To tell them I was alive, and thinking of them every day; to ask them if they were safe; to say that I loved them very much.

I had no choice but to travel to Changbai, turn up at Mr Ahn’s house, and hope the Ahn family still lived there. Their phone number had not been in service for years.

That is why I also formed a Plan B.

A wealthy Korean-Chinese businessman who came to the restaurant for dinner most weeks often chatted to me. He was generous and much liked by the staff. One evening he noticed that I seemed low. He was relaxing after dinner with a cigarette and a whisky. On an impulse, I told him I had relatives in North Korea that I needed to speak to. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ he said. ‘I have contacts, I know people.’

He discreetly introduced me to a Chinese broker with experience of getting people out of North Korea – those who could afford his fee. He was a small, tough man who seemed honest. He spoke in the cautious manner of someone with a realistic attitude to risk. But I also thought I would not want to get on the wrong side of him. He asked me what I wanted to achieve. ‘A reunion with my mother and brother,’ I said. I reasoned that having this second channel would increase my chances of success.

Plan B would turn out to be a disastrous mistake.

The frail woman who opened the door was Mrs Ahn. In four years she had aged a decade. She clasped her hands to her mouth when she saw me, and told me on the doorstep that Mr Ahn was very sick – bedridden, and unable to stand without help.

His ‘jolly fat fish’ face was unrecognizable. It was contorted in pain. He had difficulty speaking.

Mrs Ahn explained that North Korean border guards had caught him delivering contraband on the Hyesan side of the river, bundled him into a sack, and took him to their station. They said they knew he helped people to escape, and beat him black and blue. They knew he wouldn’t say a thing to the Chinese police because he was a smuggler. ‘He should never have gone back over there after that,’ Mrs Ahn said. But he did, and was almost caught a second time when the guards spotted him. They aimed a shot at him as he fled back over the river, and he suffered a gunshot wound to his arm. On top of his injury, he now had severe diabetes.

This was shocking enough, but her next piece of news horrified me. Their next-door neighbour, Mr Chang, who had been so angry that time I phoned him, had been convicted of selling North Korean women as brides and prostitutes for Chinese men. That explained his reaction to my call. He was under investigation by the Chinese police at the time. He died soon after starting a ten-year prison sentence, and his wife had gone insane.
Mr Chang was a human trafficker?
To think that I had almost knocked on his door that night after crossing the river, but instead chose Mr Ahn.

Mrs Ahn had no news of my family. Min-ho had not visited in years. Cross-river trade had gone quiet for a long while, she said, since an event that had occurred two years ago, in 1999. The Party chief of Hyesan had complained to Kim Jong-il that the city was becoming a hotbed of capitalism, and a brutal crackdown was ordered by Pyongyang. Many traders were arrested and executed in people’s trials at Hyesan Airport.

I felt sick suddenly. I had never thought that my mother and Min-ho might be dead.

Mrs Ahn’s kindness had not changed. She said she would get one of the smugglers to search for my family and, if he found them, arrange for Min-ho to come over the river to meet me in Changbai. I said I would pay the smuggler a fee.

It was dark when I had arrived, and dark when I left early the next morning. I did not see Hyesan across the river, but I sensed its presence. I smelt it. The
yontan
smoke, and fresh-cut lumber. The unearthly stillness.

All I could do now was return to Shenyang, go back to work, and wait.

On a freezing-cold Saturday morning a few weeks later, I was in my apartment when Mrs Ahn called. She said the smuggler had located my family, and Min-ho had crossed the river. What she said next made me almost scream in her ear. ‘He’s standing right here.’