The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (25 page)

I could not stand still. With each passing hour my desperation mounted. Something had gone wrong. I waited two more days in Changbai, staying in a cheap hotel, the only place I had found open when I’d arrived so late at night. I couldn’t sleep from worry, and because the walls were so thin I heard men talking in the next room. They had strong North Korean accents. I didn’t know if they were
Bowibu
agents or smugglers, but it added to a presentiment I felt in my stomach, of dread and impending disaster. On the fourth day, after still no word from Min-ho, I returned to Shanghai.

A week later, just as I was leaving work to go home, my phone rang. It was Min-ho.

‘Nuna, what did you send?’

No greeting, just this blunt question.

‘An iron, a hairdryer, some vitamin pills, other stuff,’ I said.

I went through the list without mentioning the money. I asked him why he hadn’t called. He ignored my question and asked again: what had I put into the sacks?

‘I just told you.’

He hung up. I could make no sense of his call.

The next morning my phone rang again. A man spoke.

‘I am a friend of your mother’s,’ he said. His voice was deep and reassuring. He didn’t have a Hyesan accent. ‘There’s been a small problem because of the items you sent. I want to take care of matters for her, but I need to know how much money was in the sack.’

It was a curious twist of fate that I could be paranoid and suspicious of the most innocent and well-meaning people, but when real danger spoke mellifluously into the phone I did not suspect a thing.

‘Thank you for helping her,’ I blurted. I’d often wondered if my mother might meet another man. She was not yet fifty. I thought this might be a boyfriend.

‘You’re welcome. Now, you sent a hairdryer, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And an iron?’

‘Yes.’ He went through the list of items.

‘What about the money? How much was in there?’

‘I can’t remember how much now,’ I said. ‘My mother will know. You’d better ask her. I really appreciate your help.’

‘Not at all,’ he said, and ended the call.

A week later, Min-ho called again. I was in a Koreatown supermarket doing my grocery shopping.

‘You did well, Nuna,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Our calls for the past week have been recorded.’

I stopped still, in an aisle of globe artichokes and pak choi.

‘That man you spoke with was a senior army commander. He was calling from a conference room. The phone was on speaker so that others in the room could hear.’

Others?

He explained how he had borrowed a car in order to pick up the sacks at 2 p.m. Everything had been arranged with the border guards. But as he was loading the sacks into the car, a ranking army officer appeared in the distance on a bicycle, saw what was happening, and started yelling. The guards fled. Min-ho drove off at speed.

That night, seven or eight armed troops hammered on the door of the house. They searched, and found the two blue sacks but not the third, the small white one, which Min-ho had hidden outside the house. He and my mother were arrested and taken into custody at the Hyesan barracks of the Korean People’s Army. Under interrogation, Min-ho insisted that everything was contained in the two blue sacks. He denied any knowledge of a third white sack, even though the army officer was certain he had seen three sacks. They locked him in a cell. Shortly afterwards, two uniformed interrogators entered and started beating him around his head with rubber blackjacks, and kicking him. Still he denied everything. He knew how much cash was in the white sack – I had told him. He said he’d rather die than let these bastards have it.

Oh, Min-ho.

I stood frozen listening to this, with my basket at my feet and mothers with children jostling past me.

From her cell, my mother could hear my brother’s cries and howls as he was thrashed. She hoped he’d confess immediately but he didn’t. Minute after minute it went on. She couldn’t bear it. She banged on the iron door of her cell as hard as she could and yelled that she would tell them what they wanted to know. She confessed straight away to the small white sack and told them where it was hidden.

The amount of money took the soldiers by surprise. They called in a senior army commander. He said he had never seen so large a sum coming across the border. He thought it was a fund sent by South Korean spies, and that I might be an agent of the South Korean intelligence service, the
Angibu
. That was when they made Min-ho call me. When they heard my voice, they exchanged glances. The fact I no longer spoke with a North Korean accent was not a good sign. It increased their suspicion that I was a South Korean agent.

When the call came from the senior army commander, of course I had no idea what was happening. It was just as well, because my responses and my relaxed manner convinced him that I had acted privately and had just wanted to send some items and cash to my family. The army officers then presented my mother and Min-ho with a deal. Under normal circumstances, they said, the two of them should go to a prison camp. However, if they agreed to say nothing, they would be released. They agreed. The officers then gave the hairdryer and some of the vitamins to my mother, leaving her a few in each bottle, and stole everything else, including all the cash, my hard-earned savings.

Months had now gone by since Ok-hee and I had last heard from the broker who was meant to be preparing documentation for our supposedly ‘lost’ South Korean passports. With the alarming events in Hyesan, and the continuing delay, we became more and more nervous. What happened next convinced me that our fortunes were flowing in a very bad direction.

In a brief and urgent call my mother told me that she and Min-ho were departing Hyesan immediately to stay with Aunt Pretty in Hamhung. She would not be able to contact me again for some time.

Just days after she and Min-ho had been released by the army, Pyongyang had ordered one of its periodic crackdowns against corruption and capitalism. A team of
Bowibu
special investigators had arrived in the city. The neighbours knew that my mother had been in some kind of trouble. They had seen armed troops at her house. They denounced her and she was ordered to appear at the
Bowibu
headquarters in Hyesan, where she was told to wait, and waited for hours. She knew that people who entered that place sometimes did not come out. She asked to use the bathroom. Then she locked the door, climbed out through a tiny window, jumped over a wall, and ran down the street. The situation had become too serious even for my mother to solve with her usual bribes and persuasion. But she also knew how it went with these campaigns from Pyongyang – if you made yourself scarce while the investigation was on, you could usually return quietly when it had all blown over, without consequences. She closed up the house, and called to tell me she was leaving.

That settled it. Everything seemed dogged by such ill fortune that I became afraid. Using fake documents to obtain South Korean passports now seemed like the worst idea I’d ever had. It would most surely end in catastrophe, with Ok-hee and me being repatriated to North Korea. Ok-hee agreed.

We called the broker and cancelled the arrangement.

It was three months before my mother felt it safe to return to Hyesan. She took the precaution of presenting a new Chinese refrigerator and a large sum of cash to the head of the investigation team in order to have her name removed from the list of suspects, and went back to her house. The next-door neighbours who’d denounced her stared at her as if they’d seen a ghost. She had to greet these upstanding citizens and smile as if everything had been a harmless misunderstanding. ‘The rumour was that you’d been deported to a prison camp,’ they said. They had expected government officials to come any day to take possession of her house. Once she was inside and had closed the front door she sank to the floor. She realized she’d soon have to move again, to a new neighbourhood.

Another year passed in Shanghai. I found a well-paid new job, at a cosmetics company in the Mihang District. I was the interpreter for the owner, a Japanese gentleman who spoke neither Mandarin nor Korean very well.

I moved into a better apartment in Longbai. I liked my new street with its shady sycamore trees. Families lived at close quarters. It was an aspiring neighbourhood that retained a faint edge of slum, typical of Shanghai. Pensioners in Mao-era padded jackets would sit on doorsteps playing mah-jong, oblivious to the Prada-clad girls sweeping past on their way to work.

Most of the friends in my social circle, with the exception of Ok-hee, were now South Korean expatriates. We dined out often, and made excursions on weekends. I was twenty-five years old. I couldn’t complain about my life. The emptiness in the core of me was something only Ok-hee understood.

One evening in early 2006, my friends thought it fun to go for upmarket drinks in the sky-bar of one of the luxury hotels on the Bund. Several of these bars had opened, competing to offer the most panoramic views of the Pudong skyline across the Huangpu River. In the group was a man I hadn’t met before. We were introduced. I felt an instant and powerful connection with him, like an electric shock. He was the most flawless man I’d ever seen. Glossy black hair swept back, a beautifully proportioned face, a straight nose that ended in a fine point. Tailored suit and cufflinks. His name was Kim, he said. He was visiting on business from Seoul. We sat in the window and began talking. Almost at once the two of us were in a bubble, as if we were the only people in the bar. We forgot about the friends sitting next to us. The lights dimmed from pink to gold, and the view across the river began to sparkle, illuminating the clouds. He seemed reluctant to talk much about himself, and chose his words carefully, a reserve I found appealing. When one of our friends chimed in that he’d done some modelling, I wasn’t surprised. I liked his manner. He wasn’t trying to flirt, or impress me, but I could see in his eyes that he liked me very much. There was a trace of arrogance – of the confidence that comes with status and money. But that, too, I kind of liked. Something cut me loose from whatever kept me grounded. I was floating on air. After what seemed like minutes, someone said the bar was closing. We had been there more than four hours. I had never before experienced time contracting in such a way.

He called me next day and asked if I’d like to have dinner. He had one day left in Shanghai before returning to Seoul, he said. I already felt strongly enough about him to know that I would suffer once he’d gone, so I said no. I was afraid of being hurt.

I lay awake that night, regretting this.
You fool. Now you’ll never see him again
.

In the morning I called him back. I asked if he had time for a coffee before his flight. When I saw him waiting for me in a café in Longbai, and he stood to greet me, I thought he had an aura of light. I asked if he could delay his return home. He made a call, and said he could stay a few more days.

I prayed again, something I only seemed to do in extreme situations.
I know this man is not a match for me. We come from different worlds. But please let me date him for a few days
.

The next week passed in a trance. Until now I had never been open to the possibility of romance. My emotional devotion to my mother and brother had always eclipsed all other feelings. The sexual instinct I knew existed inside me was one I’d always kept deeply hidden. In fact, I had hardly ever even kissed a man before.

Kim’s few extra days in Shanghai turned into a month. That month would turn into two years. Soon he had rented an apartment just a few minutes’ walk from mine in Longbai. We had entered into a serious relationship almost from the moment we’d met.

Kim had graduated from university in Seoul and was working for his parents, managing a small portfolio of property investments they had in Shanghai. He opened a door onto a world I had only ever glimpsed before. Money had never been a worry for him. His life seemed effortless, his problems all highly rarefied – to do with rental yields, occupancy, presentations to planning officials. He seemed unaware of the respect people showed him, because he’d never been treated differently. He had no difficulty getting tables at fashionable French restaurants on the Bund. When he flew in China on business, he’d take me with him. He had a dark side, I discovered, a reckless streak, which I suspected stemmed from the fact that he’d only ever done what his parents had expected of him and had never made his own choices in life. On one trip to Shenzen he took me to a private country club set in landscaped tropical grounds, with gleaming limousines and sports cars parked outside. The club had a late disco bar where breast-enhanced women got up to dance on tables. I was shocked, but Kim looked mildly bored. A bottle of complimentary champagne was presented to us. I don’t drink alcohol, so Kim drank it all. I saw only flashes of this occasionally. Most of the time he was sensitive, loving and quiet. He was discreet to the point of secretive. He was someone I wanted to trust with my secret. I felt more and more certain he was the man I would marry. And that meant that South Korea was back on my agenda.

For the first time, I told my mother that I wanted to go to South Korea. She did not take the news well.

‘Why do you want to go to the enemy country?’ she said. ‘This could cause us even bigger problems.’

But I could hear the resignation in her voice. Min-ho and I were the same, she said. Headstrong, disobedient, obstinate. Not even a beating in an army cell had budged Min-ho. She knew the Hyesan stubbornness in me would win out.

‘I have no roots in China. It’s not my home. South Korea is at least Korean.’

‘But you’ll have to marry soon …’

With each passing year she was becoming increasingly worried that I was unmarried. She’d been looking for a husband for me, she said – a man of good
songbun
who could earn money, and whose family she could trust with our secret. She talked of candidates in Hyesan she’d started vetting on my behalf. Again, she was adamant that she could bribe officials and fix documents so that I could return without punishment. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my reason for going to South Korea was to marry a South Korean man I loved.