The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (33 page)

The soldier moved down the aisle. He was not demanding IDs, he was checking people’s eyes, looking each passenger in the face. Why? For signs of nervousness? For anyone who doesn’t belong? It was only at that moment that I realized Min-ho was the only man on the coach. Every other passenger was a woman. Min-ho did not even look Chinese. He was weathered and had darker skin than Chinese men his age. Sunblock is unheard of in North Korea. In the street earlier, I’d given him my baseball cap to keep the sun off his face. Now he had pulled it over his eyes and pretended to be asleep.

The soldier moved slowly, taking in each face. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. He had now checked more than half of the passengers.

I glanced at the bridge with its flags flying. I could see North Korean guards on the far side.

The soldier was just feet away. He met my eye. Then he spotted Min-ho.

It seemed to happen in slow motion. I swung my legs off the berth and blocked the aisle. I felt something metal and hard in my hand. It was my camera. Without thinking, I pointed it at the soldier’s face and took a picture. Somehow, the flash was on.

‘Hey, hey, hey,’ he said.

Then I swung around and pointed it through the window and started snapping pictures of the armed police at the checkpoint.

He grabbed my arm. ‘No photos.’

‘Oh.’ I smiled stupidly with my hand over my mouth. ‘Sorry. You look awesome in your uniforms.’

Behind him I noticed that every passenger on the coach had craned their heads into the aisle to watch.

‘It’s illegal. Delete them now.’

‘Aw,’ I said, sounding put out. ‘Can’t I keep this one?’

‘No. Now. Quickly.’

The passengers all looked like locals from Changbai. I looked like a girl from somewhere foreign and fashionable. With luck, they all thought I was some clueless tourist. The soldier was embarrassed and annoyed. He knew the whole coach was watching.

‘Here’s the one of you,’ I said. His face looked blanched and stunned. ‘Look, I’m deleting it.’

Then he turned and stomped down the aisle to escape the stares. The automatic door closed behind him.

I slumped back into my berth.
What just happened?
I had a sensation of coming back to reality, as if I’d just come off stage and the performance had left me exhausted. We had more than 2,000 miles ahead of us. How often would this happen?

For the rest of the journey to Shenyang we lay in our berths without speaking. When the sun set the other passengers also settled into sleep beneath rough blankets.

I lay awake listening to the hum of the engine, as the road unrolled endlessly from the darkness. I was too unnerved to sleep. My mind was running far ahead of the coach, probing for danger.

My aunt had wanted me to bring my mother to her apartment for a day or two to acclimatize, but we hadn’t time to waste in Shenyang. I had thought carefully about the next section of the journey. A flight to Kunming would have been fastest, taking just six hours, but it was out of the question. The airport authorities would certainly scrutinize our IDs. The train would take two full days, but ID checks on trains were even more worrying because they would be face to face. The least perilous option was going by road. It would be gruelling. With all the transfers and waiting times, I figured the journey would take a week. And although there would be more police checks, the driver usually handed all the IDs to the policeman who’d check each with a handheld machine, but wouldn’t match them against the owners.

We braced ourselves again. We were going to cross eight vast provinces of China by coach.

If we encountered any more problems like the one on leaving Changbai, we would pretend that my mother and Min-ho were deaf mutes and that I was their guide. It was a desperate, crazy, ridiculous idea, but it was the only one I had.

The next leg of the journey was to Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, on the Yellow River, almost 900 miles southwest of Shenyang. It would be an eighteen-hour ride. We reached the first police checkpoint one hour into the journey. As I had hoped, the conductor collected all IDs and handed them to the policeman, who took them away for inspection. In our ordeal on the coach at Changbai I thought I’d seen the soldier glance down to the back as he’d entered. He had probably spotted Min-ho straight away. This time, I had opted to sit up front in the most conspicuous place. We’d look as if we had nothing to hide. Again, we took seats on the second level, with Min-ho at a window, me in the middle and, as the seat beside me was taken, my mother behind me, also in the middle section. Ten minutes later, the policeman returned and handed the cards back to the driver.

The moment the automatic door closed, we breathed again. We were in the clear.

The three of us began talking freely. We felt rested. We’d had a good night’s sleep at a hotel in Shenyang. So we chatted, and ate snacks. The coach was full. By this time, if they didn’t think we were Korean-Chinese, every passenger would have guessed we either came from a minority ethnic group, or we were foreigners. The coach stopped twice at restaurants on the expressway and the passengers filed off to stretch their legs, use the washrooms, and eat.

Seven or eight hours later, the coach stopped again. It was in the early hours of the morning and we were somewhere near Beijing. Up ahead, blue lights revolved and flashed on the top of a police jeep. Again, the conductor collected our passes, handed them to a policeman. Ten minutes later, the policeman climbed in. He had the IDs in his hand. He told the driver to pull off the road, and turn the interior lights on.

I caught a draught from the air con overhead and felt beads of cold sweat on my brow.

The policeman looked at the top card, called out a name, and a passenger lumbered down the aisle to claim it.

‘Name?’ he said. ‘Your residence? Where’re you going? What’s the purpose of your visit?’ After the passenger had answered the last question, the policeman handed over the ID.

The full horror of what was happening sank in.

He’s looking for illegals who can’t speak Mandarin.

I felt exposed and helpless. Our high-spirited conversations in Korean had given us away. A muscle began to spasm just beneath my eye. I had to grimace to make it stop.

This is it
.
We’re finished.

I looked over to see if my mother and Min-ho had caught what was happening. Min-ho was surreptitiously sipping from a cheap bottle of Maotai, the Chinese liquor. The rank, sickly smell of it had already reached my bunk. He’d said his strategy, if questioned, was to be drunk. He quietly screwed the cap back on and closed his eyes. His lips were pressed tightly together. I felt immensely sorry for him, and for my mother. This was all my doing. They could be safe at home now.
They will pay the price for my selfishness.

Min-ho’s distraction strategy was not going to work.

‘Chang-soo.’ The policeman was calling the name on Min-ho’s ID. The name was Korean but he was pronouncing it in Mandarin. Min-ho’s eyes were still shut. There was nothing I could do.

He called the name out again. No response. Then he called it a third time, irritated now. I pushed Min-ho, pretending to wake him. The other passengers watched as he climbed down from the bunk. I could see his legs wobbling. He was moving slowly as if stepping forward to be shot. My heart was bleeding for him.

But I could not do as a broker would have done – shrink back into my bunk, look out of the window, and abandon him to his fate.

I’ll take the bullet for him.

‘What is your name?’ the policeman asked in Mandarin. Min-ho stood helplessly in front of him with his head lowered. He said nothing. The policeman looked at the card and looked up at him.

‘He’s deaf and dumb,’ I said in Mandarin, climbing down from my bunk.

‘Who are you?’

‘We’re together,’ I said. He found my card.

‘Really? He’s deaf and dumb?’ The policeman was holding my ID and Min-ho’s out in front of him. ‘Yours is in Chinese. But his is foreign.’

‘That’s Korean script,’ I said. ‘For Korean-Chinese from the northeast the ID is in both languages.’

‘Never seen that before.’

‘She’s right,’ the conductor chipped in. I turned my head and saw the driver tap the watch on his wrist in a show of irritation. ‘The cards are all like that in the Korean autonomous provinces.’

The novelty of the Korean script had distracted the policeman from the ID’s photo and date of birth. He still looked suspiciously at Min-ho. Then he handed back the card.

Suddenly, a loud, ape-like grunting noise behind me distracted everyone. My mother had clambered down from her berth. She was gibbering as if unaware she was making any sounds, and waving her arms about in a show of extreme annoyance, or as if she’d skipped her medication. The performance was so startling the policeman took a step backward.

He swore. ‘Another one?’

‘She’s with me, too,’ I said, sounding apologetic. ‘I am guiding them both.’

Reluctantly, the policeman gave back our cards without further questions. The entire coach was watching this bizarre piece of theatre. They’d heard us chatting for hours. They might have been too surprised to speak, but not one of them gave us away. I had fifty-two accomplices to a crime, and they were all total strangers.

A minute later the coach was back on the expressway. Min-ho and my mother looked like people just spared the firing squad. Behind me I could feel the heat of the other passengers’ stares. I wanted to turn and say something by way of an excuse, or to thank them, but I was too embarrassed and scared. The rest of the journey lasted eight hours. My mother and Min-ho did not utter another word.

We arrived in Zhengzhou in the late afternoon and from there travelled to Guilin, the capital of Guangxi Province, unnoticed among a group of tourists on their way to see the famous karst hills along the Li River. We dozed for much of the twenty-four-hour journey. Occasionally I’d pull back the curtain and see a vast Asian sky over endless low hills. The chill northeast was far behind us. We emerged in subtropical China. Another overnight ride westward, and on the morning of the seventh day we reached Kunming, in Yunnan Province.

I was feeling a mounting sense of purpose and excitement. We were so close to the edge of China. The border to freedom. We were going to make it. We were going to pull this off.

Reverend Kim’s broker was waiting for us in the ticket hall of Kunming coach station. He was a tanned, middle-aged Chinese man dressed in black jeans, a cheap leather jacket and tinted glasses. He introduced himself as Mr Fang. I had an instant bad feeling about him.

I was his client, and was paying for his services, but from the moment he greeted us he behaved as if we’d been sent to irritate him, and he was doing us a favour. I watched him glance at my mother and shake his head. She had once ranked highly in her society and was the wife of a senior military officer, but in this fellow’s eyes she was an empty-handed old woman on the run. His body language showed contempt; his manner of speaking even more so.

I’ll admit that, as a Korean, I’m sensitive to how I’m treated. In our hierarchical culture, everyone is either above or below you. Honorific language is used with anyone further up the hierarchy. The safe bet when meeting strangers is to use polite forms, until you can place their age, or status. But this man began speaking to us in language reserved for kids. He was especially dismissive of Min-ho.

‘That fool’s taking his time,’ he said when Min-ho was in the station bathroom.

If we’d been in Seoul, I’d have told him plainly to his face to watch his manners, but I kept my anger banked down. I could not allow my feelings to interfere with our goal. I forced myself to treat the situation as another type of checkpoint, to be passed with calm nerves and composure. My family’s safety came first.

Mr Fang’s Korean was so thickly clouded with Mandarin that I had to keep asking him to repeat himself. I’d never heard Korean so mangled. In the end I had to ask him to speak in Mandarin, which further annoyed him.

My mother and Min-ho, meanwhile, were not reacting well to the fug of humidity we’d stepped into off the coach, or the pervasive reek of gasoline fumes. To make matters worse, the oily fried food we’d been eating at expressway restaurants all the way from Shenyang was taking its toll. Their bodies weren’t used to it. They now had stomach cramps. Min-ho, who possessed such sinewy strength, had become listless and wan at the very stage of the journey he needed to be taut and alert.

Mr Fang led us to a guesthouse for the night. It was the cheapest kind of lodging, in a rough neighbourhood of old, single-storey houses separated by narrow, litter-strewn dirt alleyways. When I turned on the bathroom light, tiny lizards darted across the walls; the shower head was a spigot with a sock tied over it.

Mr Fang sat down on a bed. Payment was the first thing he mentioned. Without asking if we minded whether he smoked in our room, he lit a cigarette.

I took out my cash. From my experience of gangs and brokers I knew that the worst thing I could do was betray any sign of desperation, or appeal to his pity. I spoke as if this was a controlled, manageable situation.

‘When I arranged this with Reverend Kim, we only planned for my mother. But there was a problem and my brother had to come with us. Right now I only have the money for one person.’

‘We had an agreement.’

‘We still do,’ I said. ‘As soon as I return to Seoul, I’ll pay the extra to Reverend Kim. He can transfer it to you.’

The man swore under his breath. ‘That’s not going to work, little Miss.’

‘It will, because I’m giving you my South Korean ID card.’ I took it from my wallet and handed it to him. ‘You keep it. You and Reverend Kim now know exactly who I am, and where I live, and can come after me if I don’t pay. And I will pay.’

The ID was the only thing I had that might persuade him to trust me.

He seemed to weigh the card in his hand for a moment, gauging its value, then slipped it into his jacket pocket.