The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (24 page)

‘I’ll make it safe for you.’ She was adamant.

We had this conversation many times. Returning to Hyesan, being united with her and my uncles and aunts, was a dream. But could I really cross back secretly and then report to the authorities as my mother was suggesting, saying that I was a child when I left and had committed no crime? The more I thought about it, the more I was tempted to make the decision to go home, and have the life I should have had. But a small insistent voice in my head was stopping me. A part of me knew that she and I were deluding ourselves. Returning now, after so many years away, was insanely dangerous.

On one occasion, my mother called me with an alarming question. Normally we spoke on the weekends, but this time her call came during the day while I was at work.

She sounded excited. ‘I’ve got a few kilos of ice.’

‘
What?
’ I sank down in my seat, out of sight of my colleagues.

She wanted to know if I had connections in China who could sell it.

Ice, or crystal methamphetamine, had long replaced heroin in North Korea as the foreign-currency earner of choice for the state. It’s a synthetic drug that is not dependent on crops, as heroin is, and can be manufactured to a high purity in state labs. Most of the addicts in China were getting high on crystal meth made in North Korea. Like the opium of the past, crystal meth, though just as illegal, had become an alternative currency in North Korea, and given as gifts and bribes.

‘Omma.’ My voice was a furious whisper. ‘Do you know what that is? It’s highly illegal.’

‘Well, lots of things are illegal.’

In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm? In North Korea the only laws that truly matter, and for which extreme penalties are imposed if they are broken, touch on loyalty to the Kim dynasty. This is well understood by all North Koreans. To my mother, the legality of the ice was a trifling matter. It was just another product to trade.

She said one of the big local traders brought it to the house because he knew I was in China and wondered if I could sell it there.

‘Give it back to him. Never get involved. There are bad people in that trade, and they won’t care if you’re caught.’

She never asked me again.

Sometimes, neither she nor Min-ho would call for two or three weeks. At those times, I couldn’t focus on anything. I became convinced they were in a
Bowibu
cell. I’d just stare at the phone and will it to ring. I’d made a special ringtone for their calls. It was a Korean comedy rap that went
kong kong da, kong kong da
. I’d start hearing the ringtone in my dreams and even imagine I’d heard it while I was awake. I would constantly check the phone. Then, weeks later, it would ring. My relief was overwhelming.

‘Power cuts,’ my mother might say. ‘I couldn’t charge the phone.’

This happened regularly, but each time I could never suppress my panic and paranoia.

On a weekend evening in spring 2004, I was enjoying a long chat with my mother. I had my feet up. The television was on in the background as usual, with the volume low. As we talked, I was distracted by news footage on the screen. Ok-hee was with me in the apartment. She noticed it too.

‘Omma, I’ll call you back,’ I said.

I grabbed the remote and turned the sound up.

The footage replayed in slow motion. A group of men, women and children were making a desperate bid to rush past some Chinese guards and enter a gate. It was the South Korean embassy in Beijing. Somehow they had distracted the guards, who were now lunging toward them and grabbing them to prevent them reaching South Korean diplomatic territory. One or two made it through, but a guard caught one woman by her coat and pulled her to the ground. The violence he used was shocking. He picked her up by her waist and carried her off. One of her shoes was left on the ground.

The news anchor said they were North Koreans seeking political asylum.

Asylum?

Ok-hee and I stared at each other.

Over the following months, the television news showed similar events unfolding outside other countries’ embassies in Beijing, and even at a Japanese school. Sometimes none of the North Koreans made it through the gates, and they were hauled away by police and plainclothes agents. The howls of despair on their faces affected me deeply. These desperate bids for asylum were being filmed by a human-rights organization to highlight China’s inhumanity in refusing to treat escaped North Koreans as asylum seekers.

I thought of my uncle’s tirade against North Korea when I’d arrived in his apartment in Shenyang over six years ago, and the bizarre truths he’d told me about the Korean War, and the private life of Kim Jong-il. I’d refused to believe him. Ever since, I’d closed my mind to the reality of the regime in North Korea. Unless it directly affected my family, I had never wanted to know. I thought the reason people escaped was because of hunger, or, like me, out of an unexamined sense of curiosity. It had never occurred to me that people would escape for political reasons. I remembered the two South Korean filmmakers I’d met in Shenyang, who’d offered to pay the brokers’ fees for a defector trying to get to South Korea. I’d had cold feet because I thought I’d be treated as an exotic arrival from the North who’d have to give a press conference. Until now I’d had no idea of the sheer numbers – thousands each year – trying to escape, or that most of them did not want to live in China, but in South Korea.

The cellphone had transformed my life by reconnecting me with my family. Now, so too did the internet, linking me to what the world was saying about North Korea. I started discreetly researching online from cybercafés. My searches were narrow in scope to begin with. The first intriguing fact I learned was that so many North Koreans were now reaching South Korea that none of them had been asked to give a press conference in years.

I had been in Shanghai more than two years now. In that time I’d learned a great deal about South Korea from my colleagues. I regularly watched South Korean TV dramas. Some of them were such addictive viewing that Ok-hee and I would dash home to my tiny apartment and watch them together, lying on my roll-out mat. But I had never imagined myself
in
South Korea, until I saw these desperate people storming embassy gates. They were risking their lives. The reward had to be worth it.

The more I thought about it, the more the idea of living among South Koreans excited me. I was Korean and so were they. In China, however fluent my Mandarin, however official my ID, I would always be, at heart, a foreigner. This soon became the main topic of conversation between Ok-hee and me. The idea had taken a powerful hold over her, too. Could we go to South Korea together?

I knew I would do nothing so heroic as storming an embassy gate. With my Korean-Chinese ID I thought I could simply apply for a visa and fly to Seoul. From reading online, however, I learned that a visa wouldn’t be easy. The South Koreans would need to be convinced that I would return to China and not stay illegally.

Ok-hee had contacts with other North Koreans living secretly in Shanghai. (She was the sole North Korean I knew in the city.) It was she who found a broker. This man had a simple suggestion: she and I should pose as South Koreans who’d lost our passports. We would report the loss to the police, then go to the South Korean embassy in Beijing to apply for new ones. The broker would prepare the necessary documents. He wanted an advance of 10,000 yuan (about $1,400) from each of us on his fee. After a long discussion in a café in Longbai over cups of melon soya milk tea Ok-hee and I decided we’d go for it. We gave each other a high five. I went to bed that night with a sense of destiny.

The next day, however, as we stood in line at the bank to withdraw our money for the broker’s fee, Ok-hee was even quieter than usual, and continually twirling her hair. I knew her well enough to see that she had the jitters.

‘I’m not sure this is going to work,’ she said. ‘The fortune-teller told me it was not in my fortune this time to leave the country.’

‘It’ll work,’ I said. I felt confident.

‘I think we only have a fifty per cent chance. It could go either way.’

Her fear was that the broker would either take our money and disappear, or the documents he produced would look so phoney it would be too risky to use them.

I told her she was being paranoid. I thought our chances were good. If all went well, we’d soon begin a new life. I could still call my family, using the Chinese network, and even travel to Changbai when I had a South Korean passport. Naively, I thought that if we didn’t like South Korea, I might still eventually return home. I was still young. My mother was still trying to persuade me back.

In fact, Ok-hee’s fears and superstitions were well founded. Fortune, as I would soon find out, was not smiling on this venture.

I started to wind up my life in Shanghai, and get rid of my possessions. There was something final about this that I found unsettling, and it was mixed with deep feelings of guilt. I knew that my mother would be dead set against me going to South Korea.

Over the following days, these thoughts sent my spirits into a downward spiral. It was the result of a routine medical check-up that tipped me into depression. I was told my blood sugar level was dangerously high. In my despondent frame of mind I became convinced that I was about to die. Like the time I was in the hospital in Shenyang after the attack, I thought that if I died now, alone in my apartment, no one would know who I was. My mother would spend the rest of her life trying to find me. The little money I had in the bank would never reach her.

I stopped thinking about South Korea. I stopped caring about anything. I lay awake on my mat at night, watching the fluorescent lights blinking in the new office block built barely five yards from my apartment. My thoughts turned suicidal. I did not feel able to talk to anyone, not even to Ok-hee.

I bought a small teddy bear for company. Because I worried that I might faint and die while I was eating, I sat the bear at the table where he could watch over me. At first, we didn’t talk. But one evening after work I started talking to him as if he were a baby, in long babbling conversations. To ward off the loneliness of the apartment I set a timer so that the television came on thirty minutes before I got home. I criticized myself for wasting money on electricity, then ignored the criticism. Throughout that month, convinced that I was about to die alone without ever saying goodbye to my family, I was utterly broken.

I decided to blow my savings on expensive clothes.
Just for once, I’ll live the good life
, I thought.
I couldn’t tell my mother that I was sick. Adding to her pain wouldn’t remove any of mine. I planned to keep up my calls to her until the last moment. I thought long and hard about how to explain the coming silence, and decided to tell her I was leaving for another country and wouldn’t be able to call North Korea any longer.

After a month living like this Ok-hee and other friends became so worried that they urged me to get another blood test. This time the results were normal. Apparently the blood sugar spike in the first test was to do with not having had any sleep the night before. I was given the all-clear, and all I had to show for myself were some overpriced clothes.

The self-pity and despondency lingered on in me for a few weeks, until an event in Hyesan shocked me out of it and pulled me back together.

As part of my preparations to leave Shanghai, I had sent some money and almost all of my belongings to Mr Ahn’s house in Changbai. After the shipment had arrived there, I travelled to Changbai myself, my first visit since the ordeal with the gang.

I arrived on a clear night in early October 2004. Standing beneath the trees on the riverbank, I stared across at North Korea. The mountains were black against the constellations. Hyesan itself was in utter darkness. I could have been looking at forest, not at a city. It was almost as if the sky was the substance. The city was the void, the nothing.

My country lay silent and still. I felt immensely sad for it. It seemed as lifeless as ash. Then, in the far distance, an ember – the headlights of a lone truck moving down a street.

Mrs Ahn greeted me with the news that Mr Ahn had died. He had struggled to recover from his injuries and had been very ill with diabetes. This affected me more than I expected. She invited me in. I saw his walking sticks and my eyes became heavy with tears. I had grown up with him always there, just across the river, a kind man my mother trusted. He had become my lifeline in China – the only connection I had to my family, to my past, to my real self.

Mrs Ahn helped me arrange the items I wanted to send across. They were everyday things, but they were rare and of great value in North Korea. I put my iron, hairdryer, some jewellery, vitamin pills, Chanel perfume, and all the other bits and pieces into two large blue sacks, and a smaller white one. I rolled up all of my cash, in US dollars and Chinese yuan, and put it in the small white sack. I called Min-ho and asked when I should send it.

‘Tomorrow during the day.’

‘In broad daylight?’

‘Don’t worry. The guards will be all right.’

Mrs Ahn hired two smugglers to carry the sacks across the river. When they returned, they said Min-ho had been waiting for them. Everything had gone smoothly. I breathed a sigh of relief, paid them their fee, and waited for Min-ho’s call.

No call came.

Nor did he call the next day. I walked along the riverbank, studying Hyesan. This was my first proper look at my old home since I’d left all those years ago. In the week I’d spent as a prisoner of the gang I never got a good view of it. The only traffic was a couple of military jeeps, and an ox pulling a cart. I’d never seen one of those in the city streets when I’d lived there. I could see a smiling portrait of Kim Il-sung on the side of a distant building, the only dash of colour. Everything looked dilapidated and poor. Nothing had changed. In China, nothing stayed the same. Everywhere was such a frenzy of construction and reinvention that a city could be unrecognizable within a year.