Just hearing him speak sent a shiver through my body. What would have happened if we had gone ourselves, or if Mr Shin had been captured? The possibilities made my heart pound and I feared the car might have followed us. I told Mr Shin that we should get back inside the apartment block and turned to walk, but froze in my tracks when Young-min collapsed in an alleyway, and began to whimper piteously.
Back in the flat, we tried to console Young-min. Even his family outside North Korea now regarded him as a murderer, and I pitied him for how small and alone he looked. Mr Shin said that the cousin had taken his phone number and that he might possibly change his mind and call back. Even though Mr Shin did his best to sympathise, I felt that his words lacked conviction. Young-min’s despair was obvious, and he didn’t even bother to take off his coat as he slid down the wall and sat with his head on his knees.
Mrs Shin was scolding her husband in the other room.
‘What? You left them your number? What if they hand it over to the North Koreans? What on earth were you thinking? Switch the phone off and take out the chip!’
Young-min looked up at the noise, but sank back into his depression. I spent an unbearably long night, first trying to calm Young-min, then drifting in and out of nightmares in which North Korean agents had already thrown me into a cell.
The next morning we left Mr Shin’s house early. It was too dangerous for us to stay there any longer – not only for Mr Shin, but also for his wife who, like us, was a North Korean in China who might be repatriated if her identity were discovered. Mr Shin made us memorise his number, saying that we should keep in frequent contact as the South Koreans might come back with a response. He also put 100 yuan in my hand – about US$15. He apologised for the small amount, but it was as if he had given us all he had. Without that 100 yuan, we would have been lost as soon as we stepped out of the building, foreigners wandering without a penny in a land whose language we didn’t understand.
More than the value of the money, the fact that we had any money at all lightened our hearts a little. Mr Shin saw us off and walked with us for a while, advising us to look for churches. He said that these places sometimes gave money, food and shelter to North Korean refugees, and a missionary might even help us get to South Korea. But, he said, we must be careful to insist that we’d fled the country because of hunger: if they found out that we had been accused of murder, it might scare them off. He also warned us that some churches were fronts for the Chinese authorities and might turn us in, so we must be careful not to trust anyone too easily.
‘I can’t believe there exists a religion that would give money and food for free to a stranger,’ said Young-min and he smiled for the first time in days. I was very grateful for that smile. While he’d tossed and turned the night before, hurt by his cousin’s rejection of him, I had lain awake worrying about how heavy his steps would be today. I deliberately gave Young-min a loud high-five, and whispered, ‘Pa-ee-ting!’ beneath the sound of our slapping hands. As if to lift a weight from his chest, Young-min strained so hard that the veins on his neck began to show, and he exclaimed in a whisper, ‘Pa-ee-ting!’ Fighting!
We automatically reached for our sunglasses, and burst into hysterical laughter when we realised we were both doing the same thing. It was not only funny, but pathetic – only seconds after we had summoned up our courage, here we were, hiding ourselves behind dark lenses. One of us remarked how Mr Shin’s gift of the sunglasses was even greater than the food, help and shelter he had given us.
Wearing sunglasses and following the advice Mr Shin had given us, Young-min and I walked to the outskirts of Yanji, looking for any building with a cross on it.
‘What should we say to a pastor when we meet one?’ Young-min asked eagerly; and I as enthusiastically replied that we should answer each question with, ‘Amen’, and everything would work out. As I said this, my chest puffed with pride at my own pearl of wisdom.
As a former member of the UFD, I thought I knew all about religion. Even in North Korea, there is such a thing. More specifically, North Korea has a number of religious institutions that are controlled by the United Front Department. But in practice, North Korea is a one-religion state, where only the worship of the Leader is allowed. The UFD’s religious institutions exist in order that North Korea may claim that it is a pluralistic society, and thereby appear to comply with the values of those who wish to give it aid or engage with the North through Track II, or ‘informal’, channels.
All of North Korea’s religious institutions are staffed by UFD ‘Track II diplomacy’ operatives and include the Chosun Buddhist Association, the Chosun Christian Association, the Chosun Catholic Association and the Chosun Catholic Central Committee. I was aware that, in dealing with the outside world, the UFD used the names of the different religious institutions. Internally, it was illegal to use these, so they were referred to by numbers. Although a cadre might be a monk or priest as far as the outside world was concerned, in the UFD they were all faithful followers of the Kim cult.
If you are in Pyongyang and go to Jangchun-dong in Dongdaewon Area, or Palgol-dong in Mangyongdae Area, you will see buildings with crosses on their roofs. The priests who worship in these buildings sing authentic Christian hymns, in the same way that people outside North Korea do in ordinary churches. But the congregations are composed exclusively of UFD operatives and their family members, who are obliged to attend out of duty to the Party. No ordinary North Korean could even begin to consider worshipping in these buildings, as they are in operational zones where entry is restricted to UFD personnel and foreigners.
But, in 2000, the following incident occurred. Once, in order to welcome an international religious organisation to North Korea, the UFD conspicuously opened the doors of Jangchun Church in Pyongyang to the public. An old man in his eighties walked in carrying a Bible that he had kept hidden all his life. He said that he had believed in Jesus before the Korean War, but after losing his family to an American bombardment, he had converted and become instead a fervent believer in the Supreme Leader, Kim Il-sung. He even explained that at his age, old memories became important, and he had come to the church because he’d been delighted to hear hymns from his childhood. The old man was reported by the UFD operative in priestly garb and arrested on the spot by secret police.
That cadre was subsequently awarded a First Class medal, reserved for the most loyal to Kim, for the achievement of exposing a religious element who had succeeded in keeping his subversive beliefs secret until now. I was there sitting in the audience, applauding as the cadre received his medal. The old man was sent to a prison camp, and the very same Bible is used to this day by the UFD as a prop to boast about the history of North Korea’s religious tolerance.
These religious activities only helped UFD cadres enjoy more luxuries that were not available to ordinary North Koreans. North Korea is technically still at war with the US, so internally, all humanitarian aid from outside is referred to as ‘spoils of war’. Because the North Korean system associates itself with the ideology of Juche, it prohibits the word ‘aid’, which is regarded as a threat to ‘self-reliance’. As a result, gifts received every month by employees of the UFD included ‘spoils of war’ donated by various South Korean and international religious organisations as humanitarian aid.
For example, on 15 April 2001 (Kim Il-sung’s birthday), bicycles supplied by a South Korean Buddhist NGO were given to the UFD, and there were enough for all of us to have one. The next month, nappies and milk powder donated by a South Korean Christian NGO were distributed among staff. I knew from first-hand experience how great was the influence of the UFD, because it controlled how North Korea was presented to outsiders. And this was also how I knew that ‘Amen’ was a powerful word that could move Christians to come to our aid, if we could only find a church here in Yanji.
But although Young-min and I walked for a whole day, we didn’t come across a single church in which we could say our Amens. Any building with a cross on it was either
abandoned or locked. Once, a security guard opened the door, but as soon as we said we were North Korean refugees, he became furious and chased us off as if we were stray dogs. I learned the hard way how we North Koreans were hated outside our country, though the Party had taught us to see ourselves as ‘the most glorious people on earth, Kim Il-sung’s people’. Every time we were turned away, we joked haplessly about the Kim dynasty, which had made the world shun us as the scum of the earth.
When it started to turn dark, I felt strangely elated, perhaps because I had been frightened by the brightness of the day. I felt as if my body could float up into the darkness like a balloon. Taking my sunglasses off, I could see even more clearly than in daylight. All around us was countryside, and there were no other pedestrians. Even the fact that I could breathe freely and speak openly to Young-min without feeling paranoid made me feel like I was a pioneer in a new world.
The icy winds of January didn’t worry us, and we weren’t concerned about spending a wintry night outdoors. After all, we’d already made it through several nights on a frozen mountain. Under the heavy winter sky, in the middle of nowhere in China, we ran down an endless country lane shouting at the top of our lungs.
We ended up in a small village called Longjing. Not that we had intended to go there – we had just wandered along, aimlessly looking for churches, and this was the first village we had come to as we followed random roads. We decided to stay the night there and then take off again in the morning.
Fortunately, we found an empty stable. It would at least keep out the bitter winds. The floor too was thickly padded with straw. Before falling asleep, we held the 100-yuan note in our hands, holding up one side each, and gazed at it for several minutes. What would we be looking at now if we didn’t have this? How hopeless we would be without it. Back home in North Korea, I had pitied the corpses of children starved to death, but had looked away from the adult bodies, shaking my head and thinking, Why didn’t they try harder to survive? Why were they so stupid as to starve to death, with no sense of responsibility to themselves or anyone else? They could at least have stolen food and carried on. But that night I could see the end of my own life not far away. After we had used up the money and had not eaten for a few days, I might sit down and close my eyes to rest, let consciousness slip away, and not even realise I was dying. Stunned by these thoughts, I wanted to test out my voice to see if it was still there.
‘I’m sure it’ll work out. We’ll get to South Korea before the money’s gone.’ Even as I said these words, I did not believe them.
As if he did not believe them either, and as if the 100 yuan would not be opening up our path, Young-min let go of his end of the note and dropped his hand. We were silent for a while. I wanted to sleep. But for tomorrow morning’s sake, I didn’t want to end the day like this. What else could I say? The thought of talking made my lips numb. Eventually, I put them together, and began to whistle a folk song from back home, ‘Spring of My Hometown’. As I finished the first verse and began to whistle the second, Young-min joined me in a lower harmony.
Our hunger and despair lifted a little, and I was reminded of a performance we had given at music school. The students of Western music had borrowed brass instruments to put on a spectacular show that got the audience roaring with laughter. It was not unusual to see brass instruments, but the way they did it was the clincher: the trumpet played wittily, to the slow and low answer of a tuba that did not get the joke. After the silence that followed the applause, the composition students, both male and female, performed as a whistling choir. The audience went wild, and we had the whole school whistling for weeks.
As our whistling performance in the stable approached the last few notes, a mischievous grin formed on Young-min’s face, and he went on for a second with a dissonant note. I prolonged my last note on purpose, and Young-min fell back into harmony, and we finished on a beautiful double note.
Young-min whispered first, ‘Pa-ee-ting!’
I responded, ‘Pa-ee-ting!’ and found my tense muscles loosen. That was probably why I was able to fall asleep. Until that night, even the rustling of leaves had terrified me. That was the first night in China I was able to forget that border guards and North Korean agents might be lurking in the shadows of every building, bush and tree.
7
FAREWELL, YOUNG-MIN
WE WOKE TO the lowing of cattle. When I opened my eyes, something large and brown stirred next to me, and I started. An immense ox, as if annoyed by the intruders in his home, gave us a long look through the narrowed slits of his eyes and snorted loudly. Instinctively, I patted my pockets in case the ox had stolen the money from me. Seeing the red 100-yuan note tucked in among my poems brought me a sigh of relief.
Young-min sat up too. He looked at me and then at the ox and was about to speak; but then he lowered his gaze and began to pick miserably at the straw. We both realised that our faces and clothes were stained and that the look of a fugitive, which Chang-yong had said would give us away as North Koreans on the run, had crept up on us. If we continued our journey looking like this, there was no doubt that someone would report us to the authorities. We rubbed our faces with the white snow piled outside the barn, but it just smeared the dirt and made it worse.
We went to the nearest house and knocked on the courtyard door. Instead of cement or bricks, the fence was made of tightly joined planks. The chimney straggled above a dark-orange tin roof, which lacked the Korean roof tiles we had seen on some houses. We waited anxiously, feeling vulnerable with our dirty faces exposed to whoever might answer the door. There was some movement, and a moment later the door opened a little to reveal an old man peering out at us. He was wearing a worn black coat, but the buttons were shiny and new, and he didn’t look like a farmer. He might have been very old, but his face looked more youthful than ancient. He could probably tell right away that we were North Koreans on the run, because he was about to close the door on us.
I bowed deeply. ‘Sir, may we please use your soap to wash our faces?’
Instead of closing the door, the old man put his head out of the gap again and looked us up and down. We thought he might not have understood our Korean, but to our great surprise he opened the door fully and spoke to us in our own language, so welcome to our ears.
‘Come in.’
The old man’s yard was neat and tidy, unlike Chang-yong’s house, whose walls were crumbling. There were three apple trees in one corner, straw wrapped round their trunks to keep them from freezing. The old man left us shivering in the yard and went into the house.
A few moments later he returned from the kitchen with a large brass washbowl full of steaming hot water. We rushed to help him with it and carried it to the corner of the yard opposite the apple trees. As Young-min and I politely told each other to go first, the old man shuffled towards us, lit a cigarette, and asked, ‘Have you come from across the river?’
Young-min hesitated for a moment, then answered, ‘Yes.’
The old man sucked deeply on his cigarette and blew out smoke that looked eerily white in the winter morning air. ‘I’ve had no end of refugees knocking on my door for food,’ he said. ‘There’s even been some who’ve stolen things and thrown rocks at me. But you! In all my life, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone ask to wash!’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Have you eaten yet?’
When he saw that we couldn’t answer with an immediate yes, he stamped out his half-smoked cigarette and asked us to come inside after we had washed. He shouted again from the kitchen, ‘Come on in when you’re clean!’
When we’d finished, we tipped out the soapy water and propped the bowl against the side of the house to drain. We made our way to the kitchen and pushed open the door to the room from which the voice had spoken. The old man was spooning out rice. The smell of it, so different from the outside air, flooded my lungs with warmth. At that moment, a feeling of bliss rushed through me that made my chest pound. It was a sublime moment of transcendence, the like of
which I had never experienced before. The smell of cooking rice confirmed that the world had not yet abandoned us.
The rice was generously served in big bowls, steaming fresh from the stove. It was so chewy that, with each spoonful, there were grains sticking to the underside of the spoon as well as heaped in its bowl. The warmth of the grains in my throat as I swallowed comforted me. While we ate, the old man criticised Kim Jong-il emphatically. He said that in this modern age it was disgusting that our leader should starve his whole country, and insisted that Kim Jong-il’s pot belly was clear evidence of his selfishness and greed.
I was grateful for the rice, but even more for his sympathy. It felt like support for our plight, especially as everywhere else the refugees were spat on.
The old man asked, ‘Where are you heading? And how did you get into this state?’
‘We want to go to South Korea,’ Young-min replied.
‘The authorities must be after you, then. You must be on the run.’
‘Yes, we were nearly caught by the authorities,’ I replied.
‘Did you cross the river together?’
‘Yes, we’re friends.’
We answered his questions earnestly, wanting to show appreciation for his interest. But what he said next left us speechless.
Dear Leader Page 21