‘Yes, yes!’ I replied a little too earnestly.
‘Well, how can I help you?’ She even took a couple of steps towards me. As she drew nearer, gratitude filled me. The very fact that she was interested in helping me seemed to confirm that I was, after all, a human being.
‘Do you need directions?’ she asked.
As she stood facing me, I feared that she might be put off by my stench. I had not washed for days. ‘Please promise me that you will hear my story to the end,’ I said.
She hesitated and frowned. Was she regretting that she had approached me? She looked me up and down very quickly, as if she might move away.
‘I’m not a weirdo. It’s just that I don’t speak Chinese, so I’ve been looking for someone like you, madam.’ If I wasn’t being careful, I might easily have called her ‘comrade’. ‘Please, would you spare five minutes to hear me out?’
She glanced at her watch, as if to say I had exactly five minutes. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘I’ll listen.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied.
I explained that I had crossed from North Korea and that I’d been evading the authorities. I left out the bit about being wanted for murder. I described how Young-min and I had lost each other, and ended by asking her for directions to reach the South Korean Embassy in Beijing on foot.
‘On foot? Why, you can catch a bus to Beijing!’ She seemed surprised, but appraising my situation from my appearance, she went on, ‘You can’t possibly walk all the way to Beijing! It’s too far.’
‘Is there another way to get to South Korea?’
She took a step forward and began to explain, as if to reward me for having put faith in her charity. She said that most North Koreans went to the Embassy in Beijing rather than to the consulate in Shenyang. She said that if I went via the city of Dalian, the journey might be made easier by the fact that many there spoke Korean. If I made some money in Dalian, perhaps I might get hold of a forged Chinese passport, and enter South Korea with that.
‘How do you know all this?’ I asked in amazement.
‘My father who lives in Helong, he’s helped many like you.’
Hearing that, I found myself telling her about the people I had met between Yanji and Shenyang: Chang-yong, Mr Shin, and the old man in Longjing. The woman stepped even closer to me.
‘Do you have family in Shenyang?’ she asked.
I smiled awkwardly, and shook my head.
‘Then where will you spend the night? Have you eaten?’ I could not bring myself to say that I had already eaten, yet neither could I bring myself to tell a woman that I had not eaten for two days. I started gesturing with my hand, looking for an excuse, but she had already taken out her mobile phone. Was she about to report me to the authorities? I looked at her phone and listened anxiously as she spoke in rapid Chinese, which I could not understand.
When she folded the phone shut, her expression was brighter. ‘I have two vouchers for a sauna-motel. I was going to go with my fiancé, but I’ve just called him, and he’s happy for you to have them. Would you like to stay there tonight? It’s not far from here.’
Lost in the thought that the girl before me appeared to be just as kind as the father she’d mentioned, I didn’t answer.
She continued, ‘You can wash and sleep there. As I said, it’s not far.’
She turned towards the road as if to say, ‘Let’s go.’ I felt awkward as she drew closer to my fugitive’s stench. We walked slowly because I tried to keep one step behind her, while she slowed down to keep pace with me.
‘Thanks for helping me like this,’ I said. ‘May I ask you something?’
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘You said you have two vouchers for the sauna. You said you were going to go with your “fiancé”. Is that the name of your friend?’
‘Oh, my fiancé!’ She grinned. ‘It means we’re engaged. We’re going to get married. Here in China, the one you are going to marry is your “fiancé”. I guess it’s like the North Korean equivalent of … hmm! I’m not sure.’
Although I was a writer who lived with words, I had never thought there could be such a special word in Korean to refer to the person you were going to marry.
She continued, ‘Anyway, he says you can have both vouchers. Which means you can stay there for two nights. Isn’t he sweet?’
I wanted to say that they were both sweet. ‘He’s a great man! Thank you! Please send him my best regards. May I ask your name? I want to be able to remember your help.’
‘Me? Wang Cho-rin.’
‘Wang Cho Ing?’
She laughed as I struggled to pronounce her name. She repeated each syllable slowly, and then laughed again. I had arrived at an oasis of intelligible language and was so grateful for it, but she did not notice my astonishment and spoke in Korean as if it were the most natural thing to do in China. I wanted to say something to please her.
‘Let me guess your age. I’ll get it right,’ I said.
‘You think so?’ she replied. Pointing to a food stall by the side of the road, she said, ‘If you get it right, I’ll buy you a lamb kebab from that stall.’
I became very serious. It was the first and only time in my life that I wanted to guess a woman’s age correctly in exchange for food. I must have really wanted it because while I meant to say ‘twenty-six’, I muttered ‘lamb kebab’ instead. I blushed. Although she wore only light make-up, her skin glowed radiantly, and I guessed that she would be in her mid-twenties.
‘Twenty-five.’
‘Hmm? You think so?’
‘Well, how old are you?’ I asked.
‘Twenty-seven.’
I was devastated but Cho-rin had a good heart. In return for my guessing she was younger than she actually was, she rushed off and bought not just one, but four lamb kebabs. In fact, she kept one for herself, and offered me the three others. The smell of cooked meat overwhelmed me.
Her kindness awoke in me the notion that, however weak-willed we might grow, we are all still entitled to life. In such a world as this, no misfortune could be random. And because of the vouchers that Cho-rin gave me, I was able to wash with warm water that night.
As I was sat in a tub overflowing with hot water, I wondered where Young-min might be. I so wished he were with me. The baths here were much bigger and there were more people than there had been at the bathhouse Mr Shin had taken us to in Yanji. Some people were eating as they walked around, and the noise of chatter and water was so loud that nobody noticed I was there.
Scrubbing off my fugitive’s dirt off with orange-scented soap, I mulled over what had been said between Cho-rin and me during our encounter. The most memorable thing was that she referred to the man she was going to marry as her fiancé. In the institutionalism of life in North Korea, anyone who was older than you or ranked higher at work was called dongji (comrade), and everyone else who was your equal was dongmu (comrade-friend). These were our comrades in loyal obedience. With the hierarchy of respect based on age and seniority so clear-cut in everyday life, it felt like a natural form of respect – and not a political or legal thing – to be loyal and obedient to the Leader.
Even among lovers it was the same. Women addressed all men as dongji, and men addressed all women as dongmu. It was considered subversive to refer to your lover by any other address or title, as they seemed to do here in China. Unconditional love was reserved exclusively for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, whose portraits were always displayed on the badge that everyone wore. If anyone were to place another human above them in any way, they would be reduced to second priority. Strange as it may seem to outsiders, it was unthinkable to us that we should love anyone more than Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. I had lived my life according to the totalitarian lexicon of a self-serving despot, who encroached on our most intimate emotions in order to steal them away from the individual. So I could not stop marvelling at the beauty of the word ‘fiancé’ as taught to me by Cho-rin.
After my bath, I opened my locker to r
etrieve my clothes. As my eyes fell on my precious bundle of handwritten poems from Pyongyang, rescued for me by Young-min from the shed near Chang-yong’s mother-in-law’s house, I felt awful for having run off to Shenyang, thinking only of my own survival.
I wandered around the motel in search of a phone. Given that this was a day on which I had been offered two nights of shelter by a woman I had met by chance on the street, I wondered whether I might strike lucky twice. Perhaps if I called Mr Shin, he would have good news for me. There were two pay phones in a corner of the motel foyer. I sat below them, as if a one-yuan coin might drop on me from heaven, and eventually fell asleep with my head on my knees.
‘Hello?’
When I woke, it was the next morning. Someone was prodding me gently and I closed my eyes tighter. I didn’t have the courage to open them, because I was afraid to find myself in the grip of the authorities. But when I realised that the voice belonged to a woman, not a man, I was reassured by the thought that it might be one of the female employees at the motel, and sat up.
Still, I didn’t dare turn my head towards the person who’d spoken. Ever since crossing the Tumen River, I had stopped being the first to look another in the eye.
‘You’re the man I met yesterday, aren’t you?’
I looked up and could not trust my eyes when I saw her. It was Wang Cho-rin, whom I had believed I would never meet again. It looked like she had just bathed, as her hair was still wet.
‘How did you find me?’ I exclaimed. In my joy at this surprise meeting with a friend on Chinese soil, I didn’t realise that I was shouting out in a loud Pyongyang accent.
‘Ta-daa!’ Cho-rin grinned as she opened a plastic container full of hot white buns, but at that moment I was truly more delighted to see her than the food.
‘How did you find me?’ I repeated. ‘Did you come with your – fiancé?’
‘No, he’s got other things to do. I came to bring you something to eat. I was passing by this area anyway and I thought if I didn’t bring you something, you might not eat at all today. I did well, right?’
I wanted to give her something in return as she handed me a bun. I dearly longed for the money in my rucksack, which the authorities had taken when we were hiding near the house of Chang-yong’s mother-in-law.
‘I told him everything,’ she continued. ‘I boasted about how I was able to help someone like you.’
As she said these words I worried over what she meant by ‘everything’. I glanced up and caught sight of the veins on her pale neck. Her delicate skin looked translucent, a sheet of glass that seemed to reveal her kindness. Every time she smiled, her eyes closed in the shape of two small crescent moons like innocence itself. But, in her small soft face, her upturned nose hinted at an inner defiance that might sting like a bee if provoked.
‘What did your fiancé say? Is he Chinese?’ I asked.
She waved at the box of buns. ‘I’ve already eaten, you have them all. Oh, what did you just ask me? Yes, he’s Han Chinese. He said it was very good of me to help you, and so he’s taking me shopping on Sunday! He really hates Kim Jong-il too. I bet most Chinese hate him, if only because of his pot belly.’
I laughed. I then wondered about their relationship. ‘Do many Han Chinese marry ethnic Koreans?’
‘Yes, why not? While they’re the dominant ethnic group and we’re only a minority among fifty-six others, we’re known to be among the most hard-working. Plus, with increased ties to South Korea, more of us have become wealthy. I will admit, though, that it’s not as common for Han Chinese women to marry an ethnic Korean man, as it’s harder for a man like that to establish himself on a new social ladder. But it happens a lot the other way. You know what? We Korean women are good with housework, and the Han Chinese men know it!’
I was grateful for the food, but even more for her companionship. I wanted to do something for her and looked round to see if I could get her a cup of water. But she beat me to it. ‘Oh, let me get you something to drink,’ she said. As I watched her hurry off to get me water, I became convinced that an ordinary, domestic life would soon be granted to me. A moment later, Cho-rin returned, walking carefully with a paper cup in each hand. I leapt to my feet to greet her. We found a bench and I sat down, and Cho-rin wiped her wet hand on her shorts before sitting down next to me.
As she bent down, I glimpsed her pale cleavage and quickly looked away. I felt I had done something disrespectful to someone who had offered me help. I had been about to take a bite out of a bun, but I put it back down. I was reassured a little when I heard her press the keypad of her mobile phone, but I still could not face making eye contact with her.
‘Eat your bun. It’ll go cold,’ she said, then added more playfully, ‘Can I ask you something? I heard that there is cannibalism in North Korea because of hunger. Is that true?’ ‘There were rumours of that kind of thing from time to time, but neither I nor any of my friends actually saw it happen. But I did once witness a mother trying to sell her daughter in the marketplace.’
‘Really? Her daughter? You saw that with your own eyes?’
It was 1999, on a day that had started out just like any other. I was walking past Dongdaewon Area on my way somewhere. Even though it was situated in Pyongyang, Dongdaewon was an impoverished district where the city’s poorest people were concentrated. The market was shabbier than most, and vendors who couldn’t afford the rent grasped in desperation at passers-by. One of them approached me and held out some bread.
‘Please buy a packet of bread for 100 won. Please, help me!’
Her wrinkled hand was swollen and split in many places as she held out a packet containing five little buns each the size of a baby’s fist. I just wanted to give her 100 won (worth around 10 US cents) and not take the packet, but I realised that I had left my wallet in my other coat at home.
‘I’m sorry, I left my wallet at home. Really.’
She might have pleaded with me one more time, but instead she shook her head from side to side with disdain as she looked me up and down, taking in my well-dressed appearance. It didn’t help that I was wearing a formal suit and tie.
I wanted to get away from the embarrassing situation as quickly as I could. But just then, several people ran past, one of them bumping into me. A throng of people was gathering up ahead, to my annoyance. I had wanted to pass through quickly, because the distinctive smell of the marketplace revolted me. Meat and fish that had gone off in the scorching heat were still on display, with vendors trying to keep the flies away with their fly swats. The ground was unpaved, and food waste and sewage pooled on the muddy earth. The stench of body odour and human excrement added to the other smells, and I had to try hard to keep myself from throwing up.
‘Can I get through, please? I have to be on my way.’
I tried to make my way past but the crowd was becoming so tightly packed together that every step I took seemed to push the whole mob along. When I got to a spot where I could at least see the ground beneath my feet, my eyes settled on the sight in front of me before I could wipe the sweat off my forehead.
In the square where all the buyers and sellers usually gathered, there stood a woman and a young girl, like prisoners about to be shot at a public execution. I stiffened with disgust when I saw what was written on the piece of paper hanging from the girl’s neck. She looked to be about seven years old. The note read: ‘I sell my daughter for 100 won.’
The woman standing next to her, who seemed to be her mother, had her head hung low. I’d often heard of cases where a mother would abandon her child or give it away, but never had I come across someone who was selling her own child for as little as 100 won.
The other onlookers, thinking the same thought, were hurling curses at her.
‘That bitch is out of her head!’
‘You cunt! Even if you’re starving, how can you sell your own daughter?’
‘She looks as pretty as a whore, but her soul is rotten.’
‘What scum you see nowadays.
’
An old man asked the girl in a loud voice, ‘Child, is that woman really your mother? You can tell the truth; we’re here to help. Is she really your mother?’
I watched the girl’s lips. As she hesitated, shouts rang out from here and there in the crowd. When someone shouted, ‘Everyone, be quiet! Let’s hear what the girl has to say!’ even the middle-aged man standing next to me, who kept scratching at different parts of his body, stopped what he was doing. The girl mumbled an answer while clutching at the woman’s clothes.
‘She is my mother.’
Her mother? And that mother was selling her daughter for 100 won? The circle of onlookers grew more agitated.
‘Tut-tut. Poor child!’
‘Hey bitch, if you’re going to sell your child, price her right!’
‘Even a dog goes for 3000 won! Is your daughter worth less than that?’
‘Who’s going to buy a girl when no one can even feed themselves?’
‘Absolutely, maybe if she begged someone to take her daughter away, she might get some sympathy.’
‘Stupid woman! What are you going to do with 100 won?’
The woman, strangely, did not react. With her eyes cast to the ground, she didn’t move an inch. This seemed to irk the crowd even more, until someone yelled, ‘Say something, you stupid whore! Hey, are you deaf and dumb or something?’
The insults soon turned into gossiping murmurs.
‘She’s deaf?’
‘Hey, she’s deaf!’
It seemed to me as well that there was something wrong with the woman. Another voice rang out from the mob asking the girl whether she had a father, as if resigned to the fact that it was no use cursing at a deaf and dumb woman.
‘No, I don’t have a father anymore. He didn’t have enough food …’ The girl mumbled her answer again, then suddenly looked up and screamed, ‘Stop saying bad things about my mother! They say she’s only got a few more days to live! She’s going to die!’
The child’s shriek pierced the air. Some began to tut, as if to acknowledge that waiting for a certain death was worse than death itself. Looking at the mother and daughter in that place, I felt sure that we were living in the end days of the world. An old woman near me began to cry. As she wiped her tears, she said that if the mother at least had a voice, she would be able to grieve and to share her pain with others.
Dear Leader Page 25