‘Let’s cross, now!’ I was surprised by my own words. Until this moment, I had been focused on moving under cover of night. ‘Now’s the time – the soldiers keep watch at night, but now, it’s bright as day, and we can see them before they see us. Let’s cross!’
As if we had planned it, I glanced round on the North Korean side and Young-min checked the Chinese side. ‘No one’s around,’ he said. ‘Should we stand up?’
‘Now?’
‘Yes! Now!’
Although we spoke with confidence, neither of us stood up. What frightened us more than anything was that neither of us had the courage to act. We breathed deeply, and as our humiliating weakness of mind was laid bare, it was also cathartic. The silence recharged our resolve, and we reached for each other’s hand to feel the heat of our bodies. We had walked to the edge of this cliff together, and would jump together.
We counted in unison.
‘One …’
‘Two …’
‘Three!’
We leaped up and started sprinting across the frozen Tumen River. My heart pounded with every step, and the ice bellowed under our feet. Over ten metres, twenty metres? Someone started yelling.
‘Hey! Get those bastards!’
I turned to look towards the noise. A group of soldiers stood with their rifles aimed. I saw the barrel, and heard the rifle cock. The roof of my skull seared with pain, where I knew the bullet would enter. I screamed but could not hear my own voice.
PART TWO
FUGITIVE
‘YANBIAN LOOKS TO
THE WORLD, THE
WORLD TO YANBIAN!’
1
‘DON’T LOOK BACK. Keep your eyes ahead,’ I panted again and again as we sprinted across the ice.
The frozen surface of the river beneath our feet turned at last into land. We had stepped into China, and had committed an unredeemable act of treason. On the North Korean side, a soldier yelled, ‘Shoot! Shoot!’
The shout sounded as if it was coming from very near. I heard no shots, but imagined a bullet grazing past me, lodging itself in a tree up ahead. I couldn’t look back, because there was no way back.
Gritting our teeth, we kept going, heading for the nameless mountain ahead of us. Although my legs were moving, the mountain seemed to be getting further away. With almost every step I fell to the ground like jelly. The snow was ankle-deep, and my limbs were too weak to support my body. When one of us fell, the other pulled him back up. Fear pushed us on and kept us moving; fear prevented us from looking back to see who or what was behind us.
‘Just a little further. We’re almost there,’ I gasped. Strangely, I found a rage surging from within, drowning out the terror that had been gripping me. Had this narrow stretch of frozen river been all that had condemned us? Still, we were not yet free. Terror lay not only in the guns behind us. Soldiers might appear somewhere ahead too.
I said to Young-min, ‘Check around for patrols; you look right, I’ll look left.’
Snow, fields, mountains. There were no soldiers in this landscape. We were relieved to hear each other’s voice say the same words: ‘No one on this side.’ Even the urgent shouts of the North Korean soldiers had faded into silence. But this exposed us to the terrifying vacuum of China’s vast emptiness, waiting to swallow us whole. China’s soldiers might be waiting for their approaching prey, hiding in a future we could not see.
But as we continued towards the mountain, we saw no guns and heard no soldiers’ whistles. As we neared its base, we saw no other living thing. Coming face to face with the base of the mountain was like coming to seek refuge in the arms of divinity. The countryside was covered with trees, so unlike the barren hills of North Korea. These trees would welcome and hide us. Only a few minutes before, we had looked on this place as if it were a distant planet, but now we were standing within that other world. Only now did we catch our breath, turning to look back towards North Korea. There were no soldiers on our trail.
We were seized by ecstasy. As we stood there, gawking at each other like fools, tears ran down Young-min’s cheeks. When he wiped my face with the back of his hand, I realised that I was crying too. But it didn’t matter, because crying at times like these was the mark of a true man. Instead of saying this out loud, I made a fist and punched Young-min’s chest. He did the same to me. After two or three more punches, the punches became tickles, and we fell about laughing. We had experienced a miracle, and we were proud of our courage. I posed to aim an imaginary rifle at Young-min. He spread his arms wide and puffed out his chest, daring me to shoot. We fell into laughter once again, clutching our bellies and marvelling at how we could indulge in such play.
Young-min found a pebble on the ground and hurled it in the direction of North Korea. I felt the vanishing speck dislodge the anger knotted in my stomach and dissipate it. We had not merely freed ourselves from the grip of the regime, but hurled it away like the pebble Young-min had thrown. Nevertheless, the silence of the border was oppressive, and I cowered when I registered that ours were the only voices to be heard. But Young-min seemed to derive security from our isolation in this deep woodland, because he spread his arms again and fell backwards onto the snow.
‘Let’s rest here for a few days,’ he said. ‘If I freeze to death on this mountain, that won’t be so bad.’
As he spoke, a bird flew across us from nowhere and, flapping its wings loudly, passed low over our heads. It felt like an omen, a warning that other living beings were near. Young-min didn’t seem to notice. He was making snoring noises and giggling to himself. I wanted to roll about in the snow with him, but didn’t have the heart and stood nervously fiddling with my rucksack. We had passed through so many obstacles to get here and, merely moments ago, had stared death in the face. I could think of nothing more wretched than being caught after managing to cross that border.
I said, ‘We don’t have time. North Korea will be alerting China. If we stay here, they’ll find us. Let’s go just a bit further, find a town.’
‘How? We don’t know where to go,’ Young-min replied.
I stopped fiddling with my rucksack. As Young-min said, we had no way of knowing where to go under this new and foreign sky. Perhaps we should follow the Tumen River south.
Peering into the woods and hills deeper into China, I spotted what appeared to be a small village in the distance. I could even make out a woman wearing red. What if she had seen us? Would she have alerted the authorities? The colour red sent a shiver through me. Still, I saw no choice but to head towards the village.
‘I’m going to check out the village. You stay here. I’ll shout if I run into trouble,’ I said.
I was high on the confidence of having outrun the North Korean border guards in broad daylight. My announcement woke Young-min from his trance and he seized my arm.
‘Where on earth are you going? How do you know there won’t be patrols there?’
I replied, ‘You know how they say there are lots of South Korean tourists in China. I can pretend I’m one of them who’s lost his way. Do you have a better idea?’
Young-min didn’t approve and decided to stay where he was, but I made my way towards the village all the same. I walked quickly without looking round too much, as I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. As I neared the woman in red, I saw that she appeared to be in her forties. She looked like an ordinary countrywoman, the sort that would be wary of strangers.
I approached her. ‘I’m a South Korean tourist. Can I ask you for directions?’
Without saying a word, she hurried ahead of me and gestured towards a house. She spoke no Korean, but I assumed that she must be pointing to the house of an ethnic Korean.
Many ethnic Koreans live in the three north-eastern regions of China, near the border with North Korea. Korean settlers had moved north in large numbers at the beginning of the twentieth century, during the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula. The population of Koreans in this region of Manchuria quickly rose from about 700
,000 in 1870 to 1.7 million by the end of Japan’s colonial rule. Though Japan was defeated in the Second World War and its occupation had ended, chaos returned to Korea within five years in the form of the Korean War. According to the Chinese Communist Party’s policy on minority groups, the Koreans were acknowledged as a Chinese ethnic minority and allowed to settle in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in north-eastern China.
By the year 2000, there were some two million ethnic Koreans living in China. Perhaps because all that separated them from their fellow Koreans to the south was a political border, the house of the ethnic Korean that I was led to did not look much different from a country hut in my homeland. It didn’t have a corrugated iron or cement roof like many of the other buildings surrounding it. These huts were called ‘earth huts’ in North Korea, because their shape suggested that they had been raised from the earth.
The hut was shabby. One corner of the mud wall was crumbling, and it had clearly not been looked after. Perhaps the only way it differed from a country hut in North Korea was that it was a larger building. I approached the gate and, when I tried to peer inside, a white dog put its head out and began to bark. I jumped and felt cold sweat trickle down my back. I worried that Young-min might think I was in trouble.
‘Who’s there?’ a middle-aged man shouted in Korean from a stable to the left of the inner courtyard. His beetle-browed face was that of a farmer, large, round and black like the lid of an iron cauldron. He wore a black imitation leather jacket, but his trousers looked funny. Perhaps he had borrowed those yellow trousers dotted with tiny pink flowers from his wife? He wasn’t wearing shoes. I knew it would be a waste of time to try to fool a local, so I reached for my cash. I took out seven US$100 bills from my pocket and showed them to him.
‘We’ve just crossed over that river. Could you take us to the city? Here’s what I can offer.’
The man hastened towards me as if he were falling forward and pulled me into the yard with the strength of an ox. I asked whether we were far from the city, but he ignored me. There was a strong smell of manure. When we went into the house, the heat made my face flush. There was ondol heating just like in North Korea, where a fire in the kitchen circulated the heat under the floor. When I took my shoes off and followed him in, the floor was deliciously hot beneath my feet. For wallpaper, there were sheets of Chinese newspaper glued in a type of papier mâché, and I even spotted a portrait of Mao Zedong amid this collage. If someone had done such a thing in North Korea, inadvertently recycling the portrait of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, he would have been sent to a gulag. When I had time to reflect on what I had seen, I wondered whether the reason that China had been able to reform and become more open while North Korea had not lay in the fact that, although the Chinese Communist Party had its own version of the Supreme Leader and even shared a history of leadership cultification similar in some ways to ours, in China the cultification of one man had ceased to be the overriding priority and modus operandi of the state.
But these thoughts came later. My immediate focus was on the man, who was searching for something in his wardrobe, which appeared to have metal ox-shoes for handles. There was a low table with an unfinished meal on it, and on the floor there was a pitchfork, caked with dirt. I realised why he had come out into the yard without his shoes.
‘Here, I’ve found it,’ he said. He took out a faux black leather jacket similar to his own along with some dark brown trousers, and thrust them at me.
‘Put those on, quickly,’ he said in a North Hamgyong accent, distinctive for its characteristic stress on final syllables. Hamgyong Province was in the northernmost part of North Korea, and perhaps the close geography and history of the area led to the shared accent.
‘My clothes are made in Japan,’ I replied. ‘I was going to pass myself off as a tourist …’ I had dressed especially in Japanese-made clothes because I didn’t want to stand out in China with clothes that might give away my identity as a North Korean. My expensive coat was filled with down, and was good for keeping warm in the cold.
He shook his head. ‘No, you have to dress like a local. If you stand out, they’ll notice at the checkpoints. Don’t complain, lad. Do as I say. Ah yes, and that money, is that $700 for me?’
I passed seven $100 bills to him without a word, in the hope that he would trust me. He hastily counted the notes. His fingernails too were caked with mud.
I said, ‘I have a friend with me.’
Before recounting his money, the farmer looked up with eyes as wide as those of an ox that had just slipped on ice. ‘What? How many?’
‘One,’ I replied.
‘Well, what are you standing there for?’ he asked. ‘Bring him here.’
By the time I returned with Young-min, the farmer had changed into travelling clothes. The bus would arrive at the village in ten minutes, he explained. Impatiently, he helped us change into our new attire. Young-min looked at him in irritation. The black imitation leather jacket that I had put on wasn’t too bad, but Young-min had to wear an orange-coloured one with prominent Chinese lettering on the back. I stuffed my old clothes into the rucksack, and tucked the manuscript of my poetry into my coat pocket.
We left the house and walked along the unpaved road for five minutes. The farmer, now wearing dark trousers instead of the yellow ones with pink flowers on them, looked much smarter than he did before. He introduced himself as Chang-yong. He looked more nervous than we were, and kept glancing around with suspicion in his eyes. He spoke quietly. ‘Don’t say a word when you get on the bus. There is a checkpoint on the way to Yanji. Sometimes they check, sometimes they don’t. If someone tries to make conversation, just pretend you’re deaf. If border guards come onto the bus, I’ll speak on your behalf. Remember, lads: don’t say a word! You’ll be fine. There are ethnic Koreans here who don’t speak Chinese. And if you have any more cash with you, give it to me. If you get caught, I can bribe the officers. How much more do you have?’
I pretended not to have heard his last question. I was not ready to entrust my life to a total stranger.
As we waited for the bus I wondered at the fact that there was a village so close to the border, and flinched nervously at the noise of a passing truck. On the North Korean side, apart from one or two military trucks on the road, the most common sight was a horse- or ox-drawn cart.
Just as farmer Chang-yong had promised, the bus soon arrived. Young-min and I looked at each other in amazement. It was nothing like the smirks we gave each other when the exceedingly late arrival of our delayed train in Musan was greeted with delighted cries from the passengers. In the capital of North Korea, buses never ran on time, but they seemed to do just that here, even in a rural Chinese border village. We found empty seats behind Chang-yong and sat down. When the bus door screeched shut, it was like being shut in a cell and I wished we had not boarded the vehicle. But seeing the Chinese around us in noisy conversation, carrying on with their daily routine, I relaxed a little and it seemed as though we had been welcomed into their world. Even though these were Chinese country folk, they seemed carefree in their prosperity. The men looked well fed and the women were as plump as the wives of Party cadres in North Korea. Some of them even wore gold jewellery. No one living in the North Korean countryside could make a display of personal wealth in that way because they would immediately become a target for thieves. Even in the bright colours of the clothes worn by these countryside Chinese, I felt I could glimpse an economic confidence.
When we looked out of the window, it was eerie to see the Tumen River and the North Korean lands beyond it. If we had hesitated instead of sprinting across the ice, we might still be standing there in desperation. The Chinese perhaps regarded the North Korean people with pity, as they gazed across at our hills bare of trees. Even we two, who had just crossed over from that country, cringed at the nakedness of the distant landscape. Although I did not understand a word of Chinese, it seemed to my ears that our fellow passengers would be swearing at the North K
orean regime for stripping its country bare.
About half an hour after the bus had set off, Chang-yong turned towards us and blinked. I had been drifting off in a daydream and, as the bus jerked to a halt, was startled to see what lay ahead of us. There was a camouflage-patterned obstacle on the road, with armed soldiers standing guard. They were wearing grass-coloured military coats that came down to their knees, in sharp contrast to the dark-yellow uniform worn by North Korean soldiers. One of them raised a white-gloved hand to stop the bus.
I was certain that they had been sent to arrest us. I felt very conscious of my manuscript of poetry, as I had been at Guard Post No. 6. My legs shook uncontrollably even though I was sitting down. Chang-yong’s still silhouette seemed to indicate his indifference, and I chided myself for so easily trusting a stranger. I looked around to see how we might escape from the bus if the soldiers came towards us. The only thing I could think of doing for now was to lean on Young-min’s shoulder, pretending to be asleep. When I opened my eyes a little to check on Young-min, I saw that his eyelids were trembling, although they too were closed. In an attempt to reassure him, I made faint snoring noises, being careful not to attract unwanted attention.
I heard the doors of the bus swing open. In the heavy sound of the stomping military boots, I could feel the weight of the soldiers’ rifles. One of them spoke, and the ring of his announcement in Chinese overwhelmed the chatter in the bus. I flinched, fearing he might be talking about us.
I heard the approach of boots and the murmuring of passengers. What would I see if I opened my eyes now? Was the soldier watching us? I sat there feeling the goose pimples rise along my arms and kept my eyes shut. The boots stomped away from us and I heard the door of the bus close again. I could not quite believe what was happening, but the wheels of the bus began to turn. When I finally dared to open my eyes, I saw that the bus was really moving again.
Dear Leader Page 12