The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (11 page)

My mother did not ask what else they had done to him. She did not want him to relive the trauma, but she could see that he had been badly beaten, and had not been allowed to sleep. At the hospital he slept for days with the covers pulled over his head.

My father kept everything bottled up, as many North Korean men did. They could not talk about their feelings, or mention the fear and stress they were under. It was the reason I would see terrible drunken fights breaking out among men in Hyesan during the public holidays. My father never drank alcohol, but he turned his feelings inward. He had lost a lot of weight, and had become very listless. We realize now that he had fallen into a severe depression, an illness that is not acknowledged in North Korea. He spent about six weeks in the hospital in Hyesan.

My mother needed Min-ho and me out of the way while she tended to my father, visiting him daily for hours at the hospital. We were sent to the east coast to stay with Uncle Cinema, his wife, and their children, my cousins.

One afternoon, Uncle Cinema came home early. Min-ho and I were in the living room with our aunt and our cousins. He took his shoes off and stepped into the house, closing the door carefully behind him.

‘Min-young, Min-ho, I am afraid I have bad news,’ he said.

He looked grave and we knew something terrible had happened. He told us that our mother had telephoned him at his office. She said that our father had fallen very ill in hospital, and had died.

Min-ho was devastated. He ran into the bedroom and shut the door.

I walked numbly down to the beach and gazed out into the East Sea. From behind the clouds sharp rays made fields of light on the dark water. A few distant, rusted shipping boats were on the horizon. The sea was calm.

The resentment I had nurtured towards my father had put such a wall between us. Why had I done that? I grew up understanding the importance of family and blood ties. Discovering that my blood did not come from him had shocked me and confused me. I had frozen him out. I was hurt by a secret that had been kept from me.

I thought of how he’d met my mother, all those years ago on the train to Pyongyang. He had loved her so much that he had married her even though she was divorced and had a child by another man. Memories came back to me, dozens of them, of our happy times chasing dragonflies in fields near Anju, and of our family life in Hamhung, of the fun we’d all had together watching my mother eat
naengmyeon
, of how proud I’d been of him when he came to my Pioneer ceremony, how safe I’d always felt with him.

I stared at the sea and the scale of my folly came home to me.

He’d raised me lovingly, as his own child. My selfish feelings had stopped me seeing how much I loved him.

I fell to my knees on the beach and cried bitter tears, clawing with my hands at the sand.

After what seemed like hours, as the sun was setting, I walked back to the house. I knew that I would regret for the rest of my life the way I’d behaved towards my father. Knowing that he’d died thinking that I resented him would only make my bereavement more painful over the years ahead.

My father’s death was a shock to everyone who knew him. He was still a young man, barely into his forties. No one was with him when he died.

But before my mother had time to react to the blow of his death, she received another devastating piece of news. The hospital death certificate stated that he had committed suicide by overdosing on Diazepam (Valium). This drug was readily available in the markets. He must have gone out and bought it himself.

In North Korea, suicide is taboo. Not only is it considered gravely humiliating to the surviving family members, it also guarantees that any children left behind will be reclassified as ‘hostile’ in the
songbun
system and denied university entrance and the chance of a good job. Suicide in Korean culture is a highly emotive means of protest. The regime regards it as a form of defection. By punishing the surviving family, the regime attempts to disable this ultimate form of protest.

My mother was jolted out of her grief. She acted at once to protect us all.

She had to get the hospital documentation changed very quickly, and this was a delicate and difficult task, but our futures depended on it. My mother’s tact and diplomacy succeeded. It cost her nearly all her hard-currency savings, but she did it. She bribed the hospital authorities. They agreed to change the cause of my father’s death to ‘heart attack’. The funeral was conducted in haste, before any questions were asked, and before Min-ho and I had arrived back from the coast. We did not even get a chance to say goodbye to him. Even worse, my father’s parents had cursed my mother angrily at the funeral, telling her that she had brought ill fortune upon their family.

As a final, gratuitous humiliation, the investigating military authority wrote to inform my mother that my father had been formally dismissed from his post.

After my father’s death I felt much closer to Min-ho. It was as if I was seeing him with clear vision for the first time in years. The stupid delusion that had made me withdraw from my father was the same one that had stopped me feeling close to my own sibling. I started to see him for who he was – my brother, as bereaved and as heartbroken as I was.

I no longer felt the same about our house on the river. Within a short time of moving there we’d had a tragedy in the family. It made me think the curse on the place was real, and potent.

We were still trying to come to terms with what had happened, when an event occurred that united the entire country in grief – in such wailing, brow-beating scenes of mass hysteria as the world’s media had never before seen. It was an event that reverberates in North Korea to this day.

I went to school as usual on the morning of 8 July 1994. Just before lunchtime, our lesson was interrupted when a teacher entered and told us that the school was closing for the day. We were all instructed to return home and turn on the television. This was odd, since there was no daytime television during weekdays.

Instead of going home, I went with a girl friend to her apartment near the school. We turned on the television. Shortly after, the famous news anchor Ri Chun-hui came on, dressed in black. Her eyes were red from crying. She then announced the impossible. Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, the father of our nation, was dead. The announcement made on the radio was equally dramatic: ‘The great heart has stopped beating.’

My friend broke into a wail and couldn’t stop. Her crying affected me a little, but it was my mind that was moved, not my heart. How could he die? Incredible as it may sound now, it had never occurred to me, or to many North Koreans, that this god-king, so powerful that he could control the weather, might die. He was flawless and almighty. He existed so far above humankind that a part of me didn’t think he was real. We did not even think he needed to sleep or urinate. But he’d died.

A door opened in my mind.

He’s an eighty-two-year-old man, I thought. He grew old and weak. He was human after all. I sat there listening to my friend’s sobs, but my eyes were dry. I was too raw with grief for my father to spend my tears on the Great Leader.

The next morning the entire school gathered in front of the school building. We stood in long, regimented lines. The sky was a milky blue and the day was warming up uncomfortably. Emotional speeches were made by the headmaster and the teachers, all of whom were choking with tears, to a background accompaniment of piped funeral music. Hour after hour it went on. I had felt sad at first, but after three hours of standing under the hot sun, I was becoming thirsty and tired.

Nobody had ordered us to cry. No one had hinted that if we didn’t cry we would fall under suspicion. But we knew our tears were being demanded. From all around me came the sounds of sniffing, sobbing and wailing. It looked as if everyone was beside themselves with grief. My survival instinct kicked in. If I didn’t cry like everyone else I’d be in trouble. So I rubbed my face in false distress, surreptitiously spat on my fingertips, and dabbed my eyes. I made a gasping noise that I hoped sounded like I was heaving with despair.

After a long time doing this, I felt I could not stand there for much longer. The sun now was overhead. It was very warm. So I stumbled a little. The teachers thought I was about to faint, so they put me in the ambulance that was there on standby. That was a relief.

The next day there was a similar event joined by all the city’s schools at the Victorious Battle of Pochonbo Memorial in Hyesan Park. This time several thousand students and teachers joined in the sobbing and the wailing. The grief seemed to be getting more extreme by the hour. A kind of hysteria was spreading across the city. Our schooling stopped. The steel and lumber mills, the factories, shops and markets closed. Every citizen had to participate in daily mass events to demonstrate their inconsolable sorrow. Day after day a teacher took us into the hills to pick wild flowers to place before the bronze statue of Kim Il-sung in Hyesan Park. After a few days, every flower had been picked, but we had to find them from somewhere. To turn up with one flower was an insult to the Great Leader.

On one of these searches for flowers a swarm of dragonflies flew alongside us in the field.

‘Look.’ In a voice full of wonder the teacher said: ‘Even the dragonflies are sad at the Great Leader’s death.’

She was being serious, and we took the comment uncritically.

After the mourning period, as I’d feared might happen, punishment awaited those who had shed too few tears. On the day classes resumed the entire student body gathered in front of the school to hurl criticism and abuse at a girl accused of faking her tears. The girl was terrified, and this time really crying. I felt sorry for her, but my main emotion was relief. As a fake crier myself, I was just glad no one had seen through my performance.

Many adults across the city were similarly accused and the
Bowibu
made a spate of arrests. It wasn’t long before notices began appearing, giving the time and place for clusters of public executions.

It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go. Factories would send their workers, to ensure a large crowd. I always tried to avoid attending, but on one occasion that summer I made an exception, because I knew one of the men being killed. Many people in Hyesan knew him. You might think the execution of an acquaintance is the last thing you’d want to see. In fact, people made excuses not to go if they didn’t know the victim. But if they knew the victim, they felt obliged to go, as they would to a funeral.

He was in his twenties and always seemed to have money. He was popular with the girls, and had followers among the city’s hoodlums. His crime was helping people to escape to China and selling banned goods. But his real offence was to continue his illegal activity during the mourning period following Kim Il-sung’s death.

He was to be shot along with three others at Hyesan Airport, a common site for executions. The three men were brought out of a van before a large crowd waiting in the glaring heat. Immediately, people around me began to whisper. The popular guy had to be lifted up and dragged to the post by a group of police, with the tips of his feet scraping along in the dust. He seemed half dead already.

Each of the three had his head, chest and waist tied to a stake. His hands and feet were tied together behind the stake. A perfunctory people’s trial opened, in which the judge announced that the criminals had confessed their crimes. He asked if they had any last words. He wasn’t expecting a response, since all three had been gagged and had stones pushed into their mouths to stop them cursing the regime with their final breath.

Three uniformed marksmen then lined up opposite each of them, and took aim. The marksmen’s faces were flushed, I noticed. Executioners were known to drink alcohol beforehand. The noise of the reports ricocheted in the dry air – three shots, the first in the head; the second in the chest; the third in the stomach. When the shot hit the popular guy’s head, it exploded, leaving a fine pink mist. His family had been forced to watch from the front row.

When I turned fifteen I began attending a special class for girls only, where we learned to knit and keep house. We should have been learning about sex.

All of us were astonishingly ignorant about men, and about the most basic facts of reproduction. For all its interference in our lives, the Party was extraordinarily bashful when it came to telling us how life itself was made. This was despite the fact that a teenage pregnancy could land a girl in a terrible situation – she’d have to marry immediately to avoid trouble. An abortion would have been difficult to arrange and probably would not even have been suggested. Instead she’d have been forced to give the baby up for adoption, or to a state orphanage.

I believed that I could get pregnant if I kissed a man, or held hands with him. My girl friends thought the same. The boys’ ignorance of sex was just as bad. I once saw a group of youths in their early teens near the pharmacy opposite Hyesan Station blowing up condoms as if they were balloons, and kicking them about in the street. If someone had told them what those items were for, they would have run away red-faced.

With such an utter lack of sexual awareness, none of us blossoming girls showed off our maturing bodies, or flirted, or teased boys at school. The North Korean brassiere is shaped like a blouse designed to flatten rather than enhance our breasts. One of the girls in my class had large breasts. Instead of being envied by the girls, she was teased.

I finally learned about the sexual act from an unexpected source. A girl friend from school invited me home one afternoon to watch an illegal South Korean drama on video. When we turned on the recorder, however, we found that one of the adults of the house had left another type of video inside. It took me a minute to figure out what I was seeing. The screen filled with a jumble of limbs and intimate body parts, accompanied by rhythmic grunting and moaning. My friend started chuckling at my shocked face. I had never even seen anyone kiss in a North Korean movie. Pornography, in Party propaganda, was a pernicious foreign corruption. But this ‘love-making’ video, as she called it, had been made in Pyongyang, for sale abroad and for circulation among elite Party cadres. I would not have believed it if the ‘actors’ hadn’t spoken in such familiar accents. I lost my innocence that day. To my mind, my country did, too.