In Order to Live

by Yeonmi Park

  My father quickly came to understand my arrangement with Hongwei. It broke his heart to see his young daughter exploited by this older man, but the reality was more complicated, and like my mother and me, he had mixed feelings about Hongwei. My father was grateful that Hongwei had kept his word and saved my mother, grateful that I hadn’t been sold off to a farmer and lost forever. He knew things could have been so much worse for me. He thanked Hongwei for bringing him to China and allowing him to live under his roof. But underneath he hated Hongwei, too. My father could hardly recognize me now, with my made-up face and manicured nails. I was a different person, responsible for the lives of my parents and so many others. Yet there was nothing he could do about it and no way to take the burden from me. He had to rely on me for everything. And he was so sick.

  My father was not the kind of man to reveal his deep feelings or show any weakness. He always smiled at me and told me everything would be great. I was so thankful that he treated me like an adult. But I could also tell he was crushed to see me robbed of my childhood. The only time he hinted at his feelings was once when he hugged me close and breathed in my scent. “You’ve lost your sweet baby smell, Yeonmi-ya,” he said gently. “I miss the way you smelled as a child.”

  • • •

  My mother and I wanted to hear all the news from Hyesan. My father told us about his brother’s sons, who were hoping to become doctors, and his sisters in Pyongyang and Hyesan. His younger sister in Hyesan was a widow who had very bad luck in life. Both she and her daughter, who was about my age, suffered from tuberculosis. My father asked me to look after them and the rest of the family if anything happened to him.

  Chun Guen had gone into the military, as we all knew he would. Even after I disappeared, he was faithful to me. My father said he came by our apartment to look for me. “Where’s Yeonmi?” he asked. He looked so sad and anxious. There was nothing my father could tell him.

  • • •

  My father needed to check into a modern Chinese hospital as soon as possible for an examination and tests. But there was a problem: he was an illegal. We couldn’t even pretend that he was a North Korean visiting relatives because his identification papers had been destroyed when he went to prison. And so admitting him to a proper hospital would be very expensive and risky. The staff might turn him in to the authorities. So instead we took him to a small clinic that would not ask too many questions. My father was still in terrible pain, and even though he was hungry, he was too nauseated to eat. The clinic doctor examined him and told us he thought his case was too serious for them to handle. “You have to get him to a hospital right away,” she told us. But we couldn’t do that. So she gave him some medicine that might help the pain. When we got him home, he was white, as if his blood had drained from his veins. We decided we had to risk our lives to get him admitted to a hospital.

  Hongwei was not happy about this situation, but he agreed to help us register him. In early November, just a month after he arrived in China, my father was wheeled into the operating room of a hospital in Jinzhou. The surgeons opened his stomach and closed him right back up.

  We could see the bad news on the face of the doctor who he came out to talk to us.

  “I’m afraid there is nothing we can do,” he said. “This patient has advanced colon cancer and it has spread to all his organs.” He explained that there were so many tumors it was pointless trying to operate. My father might have three to six months to live, at the most. All we could do was try to keep him comfortable.

  Fifteen

  Dust and Bones

  My mother did not understand, so I had to explain what the doctor told us. All I really understood was that my father was going to die very soon. I didn’t know anything about cancer because it is so uncommon in North Korea. This wasn’t to say the disease didn’t exist; it probably just went undiagnosed. Most people didn’t die of cancer because other things killed them first.

  My mother and I couldn’t bring ourselves to tell my father what the doctors had found. It was so pitiful; he woke up from his operation thinking everything would be all right.

  We had to get him out of the hospital as soon as possible, so we brought him back to the apartment to recover. As soon as the anesthesia wore off, the pain came back. He couldn’t eat anything. His condition grew worse every day, and we couldn’t afford the kind of painkillers he needed, or the IV drip that would have made him more comfortable, or the nutritional supplements that might have extended his life. The operation had been so expensive that I was afraid to ask Hongwei for more money.

  “Why am I not getting better, little daughter?” he kept asking me. “If they can’t help me in China, maybe I should go back to North Korea.” He also felt guilty about his family. We had found out that his brother and sisters had been questioned by the police after he escaped. My uncle Park Jin’s sons were forced to leave the military and their careers as doctors were all in danger. My aunt in Hyesan had been tortured when she was interrogated. My father regretted his decision, and he wanted to go back to help them. He thought he could tell the police he never defected, that he just went to China for medical treatment.

  That’s when my mother and I had to tell him that he had cancer, and the doctors had given him no hope of survival.

  “Then I will go back to die in the country where I was born,” he said.

  We had to beg him not to ask us to take him back. He was too sick to travel, and if he made it to Hyesan, he would die in prison. “Abuji, who will take care of you there?” I said sadly. “And who will bury you?”

  After that, he stopped talking about going back to North Korea.

  • • •

  The next months were very hard. The Chinese government had started cracking down on human traffickers, and Hongwei’s business had become more dangerous and less profitable. It was 2008 and the whole country was preparing for the Beijing Summer Olympics. Later I learned that Western governments and human rights groups had been pressuring China to improve its treatment of internal migrants, ethnic minorities, and political dissenters. According to news reports that we never heard, Beijing responded by rounding up anybody who might embarrass the government and ruin China’s great international triumph. All we knew at the time was that the police were getting more expensive to bribe, and they were hunting down and repatriating North Korean refugees at a record pace. More and more, potential customers were afraid to pay for Hongwei’s women because the police might raid their farms and take the women away.

  Hongwei was increasingly angry and on edge. He spent most of his time in the countryside trying to sell the women he had already bought and he wanted me to be with him to help him. I was torn between spending time with my dying father and doing Hongwei’s business for him.

  My mother and I had no pictures of my father with us, and we felt it was very important to have one taken so that he could be remembered. He was too sick to go out, so we arranged for a photographer to come to the apartment to take some photos. My father wore a nice sweater we had bought for him in China. My mother and I were wearing our best clothes and full makeup. I was draped in gold that Hongwei had bought for me. We propped my father up in bed between me and my mother, and he managed a thin smile for the pictures. I looked ten years older than my true age. My father was so skinny that I can barely recognize him in those photographs. Our poses were forced and formal. Death occupied the spaces between us.

  As my father grew worse, even breathing was painful for him, and he could not go to the bathroom by himself, which was a terrible fate for such a dignified man. Still, he never complained. As he was fading, all my father wanted was to be with me. But I was too young to understand what death meant. Even after he passed away, I thought I was going to see him again because he had always managed to come back to me.

  When I was able to spend time with him, he often wanted to talk about when he was a child. I listened to him tell stories, descr
ibing how he had nearly electrocuted himself while he was playing with friends in Hyesan. He touched a live wire with both hands and was thrown through the air. He woke up in the hospital in a vat of water they were using to draw off the electricity. Mostly he spoke about his childhood with a warm nostalgia. When he was young, he said, the public distribution system was so great that he and his friends would get candy every month.

  On his good days, we played Chinese checkers to pass the time. He was always the best player when we lived in North Korea, and I won only a few games with him in my life. But now I was able to beat him. I wasn’t going to show mercy, even if he was sick! One day he smiled and pulled me close and kissed the top of my head, breathing deeply.

  “Yeonmi-ya, it’s you,” he said. “I smell that baby smell again.”

  • • •

  Hongwei grew increasingly aggravated that he had to take care of all three of us, and things were as tense as I could remember. One night Myung Ok, the woman Hongwei had recaptured after she escaped to Shenyang, got drunk in the apartment and was making too much noise. When Hongwei lunged to slap her, I tried to jump between them and he hit me instead. The household was falling into chaos. It got even worse after we returned Myung Ok to her Chinese farmer and she ran away again. Hongwei was forced to go back to his village to make good on his guarantee.

  In early January, my mother called me while I was in the countryside with Hongwei.

  “Yeonmi, you have to come now,” she said. “Your father is going to die very soon.”

  I could hear the panic in her voice. I took a taxi back to Jinzhou and found my father in bed, incoherent.

  “Is that you, Yeonmi?” he said. He held my hand but couldn’t see me. “Is that you, my daughter? Where’s my daughter?”

  I don’t know if he was calling out for me or for Eunmi, who had been lost for the past nine months. My mother told me that he found her sleeping pills and had taken all of them. He wanted to kill himself so that he wouldn’t cause any more trouble for me.

  “Oh, Father,” I sobbed. “Please don’t worry. Everything will be fine. I’ll be here.”

  But of course it was not, and I could not stay. Hongwei kept calling, insisting that I come back and help him finish selling the women. But my father’s spirit was so strong that it would not leave his body. Eventually I had to tell my mother that I had to go but would be back as soon as I could get away.

  My father held on for weeks. I kept returning by bus or taxi to check on him, and it usually took me several hours of travel each way. Hongwei got angrier and more violent. One time he threw a heavy glass at me that hit me behind the ear. Another time he slapped me right in front of my father. I have no idea how I survived that terrible time.

  Finally, my father couldn’t speak anymore, and Hongwei brought me back for the last time to say good-bye. I kept hugging my father and asking him, “What do you need? What can I do?” But he couldn’t answer. All he could do was open his eyes to tell me he had heard me. I held his hand and saw that his fingernails had grown so long. “This is something I can do,” I told him. I carefully clipped the nails on one hand, rubbing his fingers gently as I worked. He fell asleep before I could do the other hand.

  “We can finish this tomorrow,” I said, then curled up on the floor next to him.

  I woke up at 7:30 the next morning and saw that he had stopped breathing. His body was still warm, so I lay next to him and held him. His eyes were open and I could not close them, no matter how long I held my fingers to his lids. In Korea we say that if a person cannot close his eyes in death, it is because he hasn’t fulfilled something in this world. I think my father was still searching for Eunmi, and that was why he could not rest. I thought that I would be like my father and never close my eyes until I had found my sister.

  I was crazy with grief and refused to leave my father’s body. I just couldn’t believe I would never see him again. I tried talking to him, thinking he might wake up. It was impossible to accept that the strongest man I had ever known could just die and there was nothing I could do. I finished clipping his nails and I brushed his hair. I washed his face with a towel and put a blanket around him to keep him warm. I stayed by his side until night fell and we had to move his body.

  We had discussed my father’s burial with him while he was still able to talk. He didn’t want to be cremated because he hated the idea of burning up, but he knew he wanted to be buried in North Korea someday, and cremation was the only way that would be possible. When I was ready to let him go, my mother and I wrapped his body in a sheet of heavy paper, the kind used to protect floors during construction. At midnight, two men who worked for Hongwei helped us put him in the back of a car.

  Hongwei decided it was time to move apartments again, so we packed our few belongings and headed north to Chaoyang. He knew a place where my father would be cremated secretly. Even in death we had to hide from the authorities. When we arrived, the men backed the car up to the crematorium and unloaded my father’s body. My mother and I watched as they rolled him into the fire and shut the door. For the first time since my father died, I began to sob. Soon my mother was crying with me, but the men told us to be quiet, people might hear us.

  It took an hour or so for the flames to finish their work. When it was over, there was nothing left but dust and bones. We had to leave quickly or risk being discovered, so I began to scoop my father’s ashes into a box I’d brought with me. The man who worked the machine offered me gloves because the remains were still very hot, but I brushed them aside. I gathered the grit and bone chips in my bare hands to feel his weight; in the end, there was so little left of him.

  We drove out of town for a couple of hours until we reached the small town of Yangshanzhen, where there was a house where we could stay. We had already decided to bury my father’s ashes in a secret place nearby, on the top of a small mountain looking over a river. He always loved sunshine and water. My mother stayed behind at Hongwei’s friend’s house while Hongwei and his men led me through the fields and up the mountainside. I hugged my father as I followed them through the bitter cold night. The men dug a hole in the frozen ground. Then I put my father’s picture inside the box, and I faced the box toward the flowing river, so that my father could see it while he waited for me to return.

  I had never felt so alone in my life.

  Sixteen

  Kidnapped

  Hongwei was running out of money. The Chinese government crackdown on human trafficking in the months before the 2008 Summer Olympics had destroyed his business, so he needed another way to earn income. We moved again, to an apartment in Shenyang, and he started looking for real estate investments to renew his fortune.

  Shenyang is a sprawling industrial and financial center, the largest city in northeastern China, with a reputation as the region’s crime capital. The city was overrun with violent gangs and controlled by corrupt public officials who were regularly purged by the government in Beijing, only to be replaced by new ones. The developers Hongwei knew in Shenyang were all gangsters, and when they weren’t making shady deals, they were spending their nights in private gambling parlors. Hongwei would drag me along to these smoky, sleazy clubs where I would watch him play dice and roulette games. He thought I was lucky for him, but he lost hundreds of times more than he won. As winter turned to spring, Hongwei gave up his businesses completely and became obsessed with a Chinese numbers and lottery game called Mark 6. Before long, he was losing the equivalent of $1,000 to $4,500 a day. Hongwei was so addicted to gambling that he didn’t eat, or sleep, or care about anything else. He would disappear for days, then return with drunken friends who took drugs that made them crazy and used prostitutes right in our apartment. If I complained about it, Hongwei would get very violent.

  Once again, my mother and I were in a desperate situation. Hongwei was giving us less than 10 yuan, or $1.30, a week to buy food, and we were both dangerously thin and malnouri
shed. My mother had developed a throat infection and I couldn’t take her to a doctor. For me, the breaking point came when we were taking a walk through the city and I couldn’t even give her water to ease her throat because a bottled drink cost almost 40 cents in Shenyang. We could not go on like this any longer, and we both knew the only solution available to us.

  “You have to sell me, Yeonmi-ya,” my mother said. “Please. I want to be sold. I’m just a burden to you here.”

  I felt like such a failure. I’d made a deal with Hongwei to save my family, and look at what had become of us: my sister was still missing, my father was dead, and my mother was starving. I couldn’t even think about what had become of me, and I didn’t care. Hongwei wanted me to bear children for him, but I could not let that happen. There was no way I would have my rapist’s baby. Yet I had no idea what birth control was; we didn’t have it in North Korea. So I did what had to be done when the first signs of sickness began. In China there are medicines you can swallow to stop what has been started. Afterward I felt dead inside, and perhaps I was. But I never imagined that things could get worse. And now it had come to this: I was ready to sell my own mother.

  • • •

  I searched and searched for a good place for her, but everyone was afraid of the police. I put out the word among the women we had sold before, and one of them called me with a prospect. There was a farm family with an unmarried son in a village several hours’ drive west, past Chaoyang. Hongwei agreed with the plan—he had no use for my mother—and we went to meet the family. They seemed like kind people, the work wouldn’t be too hard, and there would be plenty for my mother to eat. The family also promised to let her stay in touch with me. So we sold her to them for about $2,850.