by Yeonmi Park
I had other exciting adventures during my month in Pyongyang. We got tickets to several of the huge Arirang Festival performances in the giant May Day Stadium. I was overwhelmed by the spectacular dramatic, musical, and gymnastic presentations. Most impressive were the thirty thousand to fifty thousand schoolchildren who had trained for many months to sit in the risers behind the stage, holding up colored squares like a living mural to create enormous, ever-changing scenes and slogans glorifying the regime. Only much later did I realize how abusive it was for these children to perform for hours and hours without even a small break to eat or use the bathroom. We were taught that it was an honor to suffer for our leaders, who had suffered so much for us. Given the chance, I would proudly have joined them.
I also visited a zoo for the first time in my life and saw monkeys, tigers, bears, and elephants. It was like stepping into one of my picture books. The most exciting animal I saw was a peacock. I didn’t think these birds were real, just drawings somebody made up. But when the male peacock spread his magnificent tail feathers, I nearly screamed. I couldn’t imagine it was possible for something so beautiful to exist in the same world as me.
As the weeks went by, Wan Sun went out of her way to be nice to me, so I actually liked her after a while. And my father was very good to her. When they first met, she was suffering from tuberculosis, which was common even among the elite. He made sure she ate well and got the right medicines. She was almost cured by the time I met her. Looking back at it, I think he must have had feelings for her, but like so many other things in my life, I preferred not to see what was in front of me.
One time I woke up in the middle of the night and heard people arguing. Instead of sleeping in the bed next to me, my father was in the other room with Wan Sun, who was crying and pleading with him.
“Why don’t you get divorced!” I heard her say. “I can take care of Yeonmi, she’s small. Let Eunmi stay with her mother.”
My father whispered furiously, “Don’t say that! You’re going to wake her up!”
Later, my father made me promise not to tell my mother about any of this when I returned to Hyesan.
• • •
Toward the end of my stay, my father became very sick with stomach pains and he decided to check into the Red Cross hospital in Pyongyang for tests. They couldn’t find what was wrong at that hospital, so he went to the most modern hospital in the capital, where the elites go for treatment. Even the best doctors in the country couldn’t tell him why he was sick, so he gave up trying to figure it out and decided to bring me home.
We rode on the train to Hyesan, along with his latest shipment of metal. As we rolled through the stations, the mountains got steeper and the landscape grew harder and poorer. The bright lights and clean streets of Pyongyang faded back into a dream as I looked out the window and saw skinny peasants scraping the dirt with their hoes, picking up whatever seeds and grain they could find.
Whenever the train stopped, the kotjebi street children would climb up and knock on my window to beg. I could see them scrambling to pick up any spoiled food that people threw away, even moldy grains of rice. My father was worried that they would get sick eating bad food and told me we shouldn’t give them our garbage. I saw that some of those children were about my age, and many even younger. But I can’t say I felt compassion or even pity, just simple curiosity about how they managed to survive eating all that rotten food. As we pulled away from the station, some of them were still hanging on, holding tight to the undercarriage, using all their energy not to fall off the running train and looking up at me with eyes that had no curiosity or even anger. What I saw in them was a pure determination to live, an animal instinct for survival even when there seemed to be no hope.
Before we reached Hyesan, the train stopped suddenly between stations. People were saying that one of the street kids had crawled onto the roof of the train and was killed when he touched a live wire. We were delayed while they removed the body, and some people seemed annoyed. Otherwise the incident didn’t seem to bother anyone.
My mother picked us up at the station while my father went to pay the policeman guarding the #9 Freight car and then pick up his package. I was so happy to be home, and to see our familiar house and my garden of sunflowers. I had missed my mother so much and I couldn’t wait to tell her everything that happened in Pyongyang.
“Did you see the Juche Tower, Yeonmi-ya?” my mother said as she made me a rice cake. “And all the monuments?”
“Yes, Umma! We went everywhere with Wan Sun.”
“Really?” my mother said with a very cool voice.
“Yes,” I said. “And we went to the zoo, too!”
But I didn’t say any more.
• • •
Eunmi went back to Pyongyang with my father, and then returned home with him at the end of the summer. While he was in Hyesan, my father got a call through to Wan Sun and heard some troubling news. It turned out she was doing some side business helping another smuggler in Pyongyang, and that smuggler had informed on her. The police had picked her up for questioning, but she ran away during a break in her interrogation. Now she was in hiding.
Before my father left to return to Pyongyang, my mother warned him to stay away from Wan Sun from now on. She told him that girl was trouble.
But he did not listen.
Seven
The Darkest Nights
My father returned to Pyongyang at the end of October 2002, and before long he had another shipment of metal ready to go to China. All that was missing was a burlap sack and some rope to prepare the package for the train to Hyesan. Those items were hard to find, even in the capital, but my father knew somebody in town who usually had a good supply.
Ignoring my mother’s advice, and his own good sense, he had contacted Wan Sun after he arrived in Pyongyang. Apparently she was still helping him with his business because Wan Sun went to purchase the rope and sack while he waited at a nearby market. What they didn’t know was that detectives from the prosecutor’s office—which has its own investigators—were watching the house, probably because they had received a tip that Wan Sun and possibly my father would be arriving.
My father waited for about an hour, and when Wan Sun didn’t return, he went looking for her. The detectives had set a trap for him at the house, but they didn’t arrest him right away. Instead they followed him, hoping he would lead them to his cache of illegal metals. But when they saw he was about to get on a bus and disappear, they grabbed him.
“Are you Park Jin Sik?” one of them demanded.
“Yes,” my father said. And with that each took one of his arms and placed him under arrest.
Later, when my mother tried to piece together what happened, she learned that the police had arrested a copper smuggler in Pyongyang who knew about my father’s operation. During her interrogation, she told the police that she could name two other people buying stolen metals, a “big fish” from Hyesan named Park Jin Sik who worked with a young girl from Pyongyang.
Wan Sun was arrested at the same time as my father and sentenced to six months in a labor “training” camp. We heard that she got married to a former military officer after she finished her sentence, and had a baby with him. I was happy to hear that she was able to put her troubles behind her. Like everybody else, she was just trying to survive.
Sadly, my father would pay a much bigger price for his crimes against the state.
• • •
In November 2002, my mother came back from a visit to the post office crying and shaking. I didn’t understand why until I heard her talking to my friend Yong Ja’s grandmother. My mother told her she had tried to call my father in Pyongyang but couldn’t reach him. That’s when she found out he had been arrested for smuggling.
My mother hoped it was all a mistake, or even a bad dream. But she knew she had to act quickly. She needed to travel to the capital to find o
ut where my father was being held, and to see if she could pay enough money to get him out of jail.
The morning my mother left for Pyongyang, she sat down with me and my sister to explain what had happened, and what was going to happen next. She warned us that people would treat us differently now.
“They might say bad things about our family,” she said. “But please try not to let it bother you too much. Your father will come home soon and will protect us.” She told us we had nothing to be ashamed of, so we should laugh out loud like always, and act as if nothing was wrong.
She kneeled before Eunmi and said, “You are the first child, and so you are the pillar of this house while I am away.” Then she turned to me and said, “Yeonmi, you have to help Eunmi.”
She left us with a bag of rice and some cooking oil. She told us there would be no money coming for a while, and that we couldn’t eat like before. We had to save everything now, and not waste even one grain.
We walked her to the station, and as she was about to board the train, she gave us about 200 won, enough for a bit of dried beans or corn if we ran out of rice. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, and I’ll bring more food,” she said. Then she hugged us good-bye. We watched for a long time as the train pulled away. I was only eight years old, but I felt like my childhood was departing with her.
On the way back to our house Eunmi and I saw someone selling food on the street. We stared for a long time at the candy and imported snacks from China. Our mother had never let us have these treats because they were so expensive, but we were keen to try them. Without thinking, we spent all the money our mother had left for us on a small bag of Chinese sandwich cookies and a cup of sunflower seeds.
It would be more than a month before we saw our mother again.
Winter had arrived and the days got dark too quickly. The air was so cold that the door to our house kept freezing shut. And it was very difficult for us to figure out how to make a fire to heat the house and cook food. My mother had left us some firewood, but we weren’t very good at chopping it into small pieces. The ax was too heavy for me and I had no gloves. For a long time I picked splinters out of my hands.
Early one evening, I was in charge of making the fire in the kitchen, but I used wet wood and it started to smoke too much. My sister and I were struggling to breathe, but we couldn’t open the doors or windows because they were frozen solid. We screamed and banged on the wall to our neighbor’s house, but nobody could hear us. I finally picked up the ax and broke the ice to open the door.
It was a miracle we survived that terrible month. The food my mother left for us ran out quickly, and by the end of December we were nearly starving. Sometimes our friends’ mothers would feed us, but they were struggling, too. The famine was supposed to have ended in North Korea in the late 1990s, but life was still very hard, even years later. My father’s younger sister who lived in Hyesan had nothing to spare, and my uncle Park Jin was furious that my father had brought more trouble and disgrace to the family by getting himself arrested. It was so hurtful because my parents had always been generous with him and his family. Now we didn’t feel we could ask him for help.
Our neighbor Kim Jong Ae was a kind woman who tried to keep an eye on us. She was a party member and worked for the Military Mobilization Department so she was doing better than most people we knew. I’ll never forget the freezing day when my sister and I were outside playing in the snow with our friends—it was winter break from school—and when we came back to our house at five p.m. it was already dark. We had no lights in the house and no food. We just sat in the kitchen, preparing for another cold, hungry night, when Jong Ae appeared in the doorway with a steaming bowl of rice. I can still close my eyes and remember the incredible aroma of that rice, probably the best thing I have ever smelled in my life. I have never had a more delicious meal, or been more grateful for a simple act of kindness.
My friend Yong Ja and her grandmother helped us, too. Yong Ja sometimes slept at our house so that my sister and I wouldn’t be so afraid of the dark. It is painful to write these words because I don’t like to remember how I felt during those desperate times. Since then I have hated the dark. Even now when I’m upset and having a hard time, I turn on all the lights and make the room as bright as possible. If night never came again, I would be happy.
To fill up the lonely hours, my sister and I would sing the same songs our mother soothed us with when we were babies. We wished we could just hear her voice telling us she would come back, but there were no phones and no number where we could reach her.
When my mother knocked on the door without warning one day in January, we couldn’t believe it. We just threw our arms around her and wouldn’t let go. All three of us cried and cried with happiness that we were all still alive. She brought us some rice and corn and dried beans, and we were so hungry it was hard to resist cooking ourselves a big feast. But we knew the food had to last because our mother told us she couldn’t stay long. She had to get back to Pyongyang to earn some money, and to try to help our father.
The story she told us was terrifying: Soon after she arrived, she found he was being held at a detention and interrogation center called a ku ryujang. At first they wouldn’t let her see my father, but finally she was able to bribe one of the guards to get in. My father was in a shocking condition. He told her the police had tortured him by beating one place on his leg until it swelled up so badly that he could barely move. He couldn’t even get to the toilet. Then the guards tied him in a kneeling position with a wooden stick behind his knees, causing even more excruciating pain. They wanted to know how much he had sold to smugglers and who else was involved in the operation. But he told them very little.
Later he was moved to Camp 11, the Chungsan “reeducation” labor camp northwest of Pyongyang. This type of facility is mostly for petty criminals or women who have been captured escaping North Korea. But these kinds of prisons can be as brutal as the felony-level and even the political prison camps in the North Korean gulag. In “reeducation” camps, the inmates are forced to work at hard labor all day, in the fields or in manufacturing jobs, on so little food that they have to fight over scraps and sometimes eat rats to survive. Then they have to spend the evenings memorizing the Leaders’ speeches or engaging in endless self-criticism sessions. Although they have committed “crimes against the people,” these prisoners are thought to be redeemable, so they can be sent back to society once they have repented and finished an intensive refresher course in Kim Il Sung’s teachings. Sometimes prisoners are given a trial, sometimes not. But my mother thought it was a good sign that my father had been sent to one of these so-called lighter facilities. It gave her hope that we could all be together again soon.
Eunmi and I were relieved to have our mother home. That night we all snuggled together by the fire, and I slept without fear for the first time in weeks. The next day, though, we woke up to detectives pounding on our door. They had come to arrest my mother for questioning about my father’s crimes. But when the police officers saw that she had young children in the house, they took pity on us. They asked if she had any relatives who could take us while she was being interrogated, and she told them about my father’s brother, Uncle Jin. So the police asked the head of our inminban to find him and bring him to our house. When he arrived, they ordered him to care for us while our mother was being questioned, and then they led her away.
For the next few days, she had to sit in a room at the prosecutors’ office in Hyesan day and night, writing statements about herself and my father and everything they had done wrong. Then a detective would read the pages and ask her more questions. At night they would simply lock the office door and go away. In the morning they came back to start the interrogation again.
Finally, she was released. The police trusted her enough to travel, but she was told she had to return to continue her interrogation at a later time.
Eunmi and I were so grateful tha
t she wasn’t sent away to prison, like our father. But when she came to see us at Uncle Jin’s house, we begged her to let us stay at home while she returned to Pyongyang to try to help my father. My uncle and aunt were unkind to us; they ordered us around like servants, and made us feel so unwelcome that we didn’t know what might happen to us when she was gone. We told our mother we were better off staying alone in our own house. Besides, we were learning how to take care of ourselves. She reluctantly agreed.
I still cry whenever I think of the moment my mother left us again. She was wearing a beige-colored jacket, and I was crying and holding on to it, not letting her go. Life without her was so difficult. I wanted to live like other kids, with someone to wait for me to come home, to tell me it’s time for dinner or it’s time to wake up. I just missed her so much. At first she tried to pretend it wasn’t a big deal that she was leaving again, but then she started crying with me, too.
“Please be a good girl, Yeonmi-ya,” she said. “You just have to sleep for forty nights and I’ll be home.”
That felt like a very long time to me, and it was. My mother would come and go frequently over the next seven months. Often she would be gone for several weeks at a time. She had a business buying and selling watches, clothes, and used televisions—all things that the government didn’t care much about if they caught you. But it took a long time to move all her products. She was able to see my father only once more, and neither of them had any way of knowing how long he would be held in prison. Sometimes when she came back to Hyesan she had no food or snacks to bring us. When we were younger, my sister and I might have complained, but not anymore. All we cared about was that she was all right, and that we were together at least for a while.