The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (38 page)

A week before my mother and Min-ho emerged from Hanawon I decided to have the long-overdue talk with Kim. I did not want to postpone it any longer. My family was about to join me. A new chapter was beginning, and I knew Kim would not be a part of it. My experiences had made me a realist. I was not going to be a romantic fool hoping that he’d defy his parents and marry me, nor did I expect him to. He’d never done anything to displease his family. Pining over lost love was for TV dramas, not for me. My priority now was to help my mother and Min-ho adjust to a new life. I had to move on.

‘I don’t think we have a future,’ I said to him. I think he’d guessed from my tone why I’d come to his apartment this evening.

After a long, heavy pause he said: ‘I know. You’re right. It would be hard to deal with my family.’

We sat for a while just looking at each other across the sofa in his apartment, listening to the sounds of the city. I hadn’t expected to feel as sad as I did. It was such a shame. We liked and respected each other very much. He’d come home from the gym and was wearing a sweatshirt that showed off his body. He was a beautiful man, and kind. But his future was as closely connected to his past, and to his family, as mine was to mine. And that meant separate destinies.

‘There’s not much left to say then.’ If I wasn’t going to cry, I needed to get this over with quickly.

‘I guess not,’ he said.

I smiled at him warmly. ‘Let’s part as friends.’

We embraced, and I left before he saw me break down.

Two days later I was waiting anxiously at the top of the subway stairs for my mother and Min-ho. It was now August 2010, almost a full year since our drama in Changbai, and nine months since I had last seen them in Laos. When I caught sight of them I bounded down the stairs and into their arms. At last they were free, South Korean citizens. My worry was how well they’d cope with the ‘free’.

‘You told me it would all take two weeks,’ was the first thing Mother said. ‘If I had known how long and awful the journey was going to be, I doubt I would have agreed.’

‘Well, we’re all here now,’ I said. ‘That’s what matters. Min-ho, look at you. You were too thin last time I saw you. Now you’re too fat.’ Actually, he looked much healthier.

‘No way,’ he said. He grinned at me, and I saw my father in him. ‘I’m hungry. Let’s eat.’

Their eyes were everywhere. The subway had disgorged my family into the bustling area near City Hall. Their senses were being assaulted by the sights and sounds of the most modern city in the world. Seoul is bright with signage that competes to grab attention, and illuminated advertising designed to entice and allure. Streets are solid with more traffic than a North Korean could ever imagine. Crowds moved in every direction. These were the modern Koreans, whose language was recognizable to my mother but whose fashions, attitudes and indifference toward the thousands of foreigners of all races living unmolested in their midst were so at odds with what she had known. Everywhere she looked was a vast hive of activity, and prosperity.

I had invited Ok-hee along, to join us for
seolleongtang,
ox-bone soup.

‘Eat a lot, Omma,’ I said. I was concerned that she looked frail. I’d hoped she would look relaxed and healthy after Hanawon.

‘I was too stressed to eat most of the time,’ she said.

We chatted freely until the restaurant closed. I was so happy, and kept holding their hands. I had been fantasizing about a scene like this for more than a decade.

My mother’s first few days of freedom in the developed world were overtaken by a series of small miracles. She struggled to keep up. At Dongdaemun, a popular night market of street-food vendors, she was transfixed by the ATM where I’d withdrawn cash. ‘I can’t figure it out,’ she said. She thought an extremely small teller was crouched inside a tiny room in the wall, counting out notes at high speed. ‘The poor thing, stuck in there without a window.’

‘Omma.’ I started laughing. ‘It’s a machine.’

The travel card I gave her also flummoxed her. When we got on a bus, she swiped it over the reader, as I had shown her, and a mechanized woman’s voice said ‘
hwanseung imnida
’
(transfer), meaning that the fare had been paid.

‘Do I need to reply?’ my mother asked loudly.

Later, in the street, she asked me if the kids she kept seeing were from South Korea’s equivalent of some sort of Socialist Youth League.

‘No, why do you say that?’

‘They salute each other, like this.’ She held up her palm.

‘Omma, that’s called a “high five”.’

One evening, as we were strolling after dinner she said: ‘It wasn’t all bull.’

‘What wasn’t, Omma?’

‘All these cars. All these lights. I’d seen them in the illegal South Korean TV dramas, but I’d always thought it was propaganda, that they’d brought all the cars in the city to the same street where they were filming.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s astonishing.’

That September 2010, I was accepted by the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies for an undergraduate course in Chinese and English that would start in spring the following year. Min-ho had an apartment of his own. My mother looked for work so that she could help support me. Her previously privileged position of authority in North Korea – at the government bureau in Hyesan – counted for nothing in Seoul, so she took a job as a cleaner in a small motel where rooms were charged by the hour. She received board and lodging at the motel, with one day off per month. She was getting old, and wasn’t used to the hard physical labour. Within a few weeks in the job, she was changing sheets on a bed when she slipped a disc in her spine, collapsed in agony, and soon after had to have surgery.

My mother’s brave attempt at a new life in the South began to falter. It didn’t help that she saw Min-ho struggling, too.

Among the 27,000 North Koreans in the South, two kinds of life have been left behind: the wretched life of persecution and hunger, and the manageable life that was not so bad. People in the first group adjust rapidly. Their new life, however challenging, could only be better. For the people in the second group, life in the South is far more daunting
.
It often makes them yearn for the simpler, more ordered existence they left behind, where big decisions are taken for them by the state, and where life is not a fierce competition.

My mother, who had arranged the paperwork for her own death before leaving Hyesan, had also left money behind with Aunt Tall, on the understanding that she might return. She began to miss her brothers and sisters so much that she would weep for them every night after work. She started endlessly recalling tales of the long-ago antics of Uncle Opium, or the hardships of Uncle Poor, or the business tricks of Aunt Pretty. Then, finally, one night, she came out with it.

‘I want to go home.’

‘Omma.’ It was what I’d dreaded to hear. ‘You can’t. You know what they’ll do.’

‘I am prepared to die,’ she said, stoically gazing into space. ‘I want to die at home.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘I never see the sun,’ she said. It was winter, and dark when she got up for work, and dark when she finished. ‘Did I come here for this? There’s no meaning here, no future.’

We had this conversation in one form or another for the next few months. She never once accused me of doing the wrong thing by persuading her to defect, but I started to feel that I had made a terrible mistake. I had taken an enormous risk with our lives, and at a great cost in effort and money, so that we could be together. But despite my best intentions, my mother was now miserable. She was caught in a dreadful dilemma: she longed to go home, but then she would be separated from me once more.

At first I encouraged her to be patient. It wasn’t easy to adjust to life here, I said, but she would succeed. It would just take a little time. But when she started saying that she wanted to die in the North, I knew I could not ignore her.

With a heavy heart I told her I would help her get back there safely, if that’s what she truly wanted. Over several weeks, I weighed the risks. It was unbelievable that after all we’d been through I was now trying to figure a way of guiding my mother all the way back to North Korea. But if her mind was made up, what choice did I have?

The return trip to the North would not be nearly as arduous as our long journey to Seoul. We could get back to the border at Changbai easily, as South Korean tourists, and I could hire a broker to take her over the river. But she had to be sure – really, absolutely sure – that she could cover her tracks when she was back there.

I lay on my bed, unable to sleep, staring at the beige blanket of the sky over Seoul.
Am I really going to do this?

‘Omma,’ I said the next day. ‘If they find out you’ve been in China, they’ll arrest you and beat you. If they find out you’ve been here …’ I didn’t need to say anything. We both knew what her fate would be. I looked her in the eye. ‘I need to know your plan will work.’

‘It will work,’ she said. ‘I know exactly who to bribe at the records office and he’s all right. Then your Aunt Pretty will help me move to a new city. No one will ever know I’ve been away.’

That seemed to decide it. Min-ho was very unhappy about this. He missed home as much as our omma did. He was having adjustment problems of his own, and didn’t want to lose his mother, too.

Over the next week I began to plan her journey. But when I tried discussing dates and practicalities with her she became reticent, distracted, as if she were preoccupied with some inner turmoil.

At the same time, I was trying to convince Min-ho to try for university. He was restless and disaffected. My greatest fear was that he’d turn to crime. Smuggling in North Korea may have been illegal, but the police gave it a nod and a wink, and, informally, it was a socially accepted form of business. But in South Korea, society would not tolerate it. The idea of college terrified Min-ho. He looked brought down whenever I mentioned it. His worthless North Korean education had put him years behind other students his age. I told him to take a year to think about it.

He had already found a job on a construction site, which he tackled with his usual doggedness, working so hard that he was promoted to team leader within weeks. After six months, however, he quit, telling me that if he didn’t do something now, he’d spend the rest of his life on building sites. He would try for university. I was enormously relieved and pleased by this, and it was quickly followed by more good news.

‘I won’t go back,’ my mother said abruptly one morning.

I’d guessed she’d been having doubts, and had stayed quiet hoping they’d take root.

‘I’d miss you and your brother too much,’ she said. ‘I’d be able to see your aunts and uncles and your cousins, but I’d miss you so much that I’d be in double agony.’ She’d been staying at my apartment that night. Later, when she had gone to work, I cried miserably. My relief was marred by the fact that I’d condemned her to experience loss and regret for the rest of her life. I was acutely aware that I had done this to her.

By the spring of 2011, it had been nine months since my mother and Min-ho had been living freely in Seoul. Just when I thought both of them were beginning to settle down and adjust to the reality of their new lives, another drama occurred that almost tore us apart all over again.

Min-ho had re-established contact with Yoon-ji, his fiancée, and called her regularly. He wasn’t giving up on her, and over many conversations had convinced her to join him in the South, making all the complex preparations with brokers to get her across China. I did not deter him. He knew the dangers. But he had his heart set.

He applied for his passport, got a Chinese visa, and went to get her, but by the time he reached Changbai, she had changed her mind. She didn’t want to create problems for her parents, she said.

A few days later, on my first day at university, he called me. It was a beautiful spring day. I was crossing the campus, looking at a map to locate my faculty building.

‘I’m in Changbai.’ His voice rang strange, as if we were in a dream. ‘I’m looking across at Hyesan right now.’

‘You shouldn’t go that close. Someone might recognize you.’

‘Nuna, I’m very sorry to tell you this. I’m going back.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘I cut my hair today, dumped my jeans, and bought trousers that look North Korean.’

My blood froze. ‘What? When?’

‘Now. I’m crossing back now.’

I screamed. ‘Min-ho, you can’t.’

‘Yoon-ji’s mother will take care of everything. It’ll be like I never left.’

I tried to focus. I had to stop him. I felt a horrible tension building in my head.

‘Min-ho, listen to me. Once you go over, you can never come back. Think about this.’

‘I have no future in Seoul,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if I can handle college. In Hyesan, I can marry Yoon-ji. I know what to do to make money.’

‘You’re not sure, because you’ve just arrived and it’s still scary. But after a year or two, you’ll be fine.’

He fell silent and I could hear him breathing deeply, that trick he had when he wished something wasn’t happening.

‘Min-ho. You’re my brother. I can’t lose you again now. You’re the man in our family. Think of Omma. What will this do to her? We’ve had a hell of a journey, and we’re still not finished. It’s hard, but we can overcome this. You and me, we’re young. We can do anything. Remember how hard it was to get here? But we did it. You want to throw that away?’

‘What about Yoon-ji?’ His voice was faint and so sad.

It was the dilemma all three of us had. Every choice we made cut us off permanently from someone we loved.

‘She’ll be all right.’ I came in hard, addressing what I guessed lay behind this – his underlying fear that he would never find a woman in South Korea interested in him. ‘There are many girls here. I have friends. I’ll start introducing you. They know you’re my hero.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Or we can go to America together. We can get our degrees and go to America. There’s uncertainty in Korea, but America’s the country of freedom.’