The deaf woman had a waxy look about her, as if she had already become a corpse, and there seemed to be no blood in her skeletal hands. The sleeves of her shirt and her trouser bottoms were thickly padded, patched over many times. The immaculate stitching was pathetic evidence of one human being’s defiant struggle against poverty.
I was reminded of a saying that handicapped people were skilled with their hands. The child, taking after the mother, was pretty. Although her cheekbones stuck out, you could see that with a bit of flesh, she would be attractive. On her chin just beneath her lips, she had a beauty spot. My elders used to say that that if a girl had a mole where it was visible, it was bad luck. That was certainly the case here.
By this time, no more curses were being cast at the woman, only sympathetic murmurs.
‘So how will the girl carry on after the mother dies?’
‘If only there was a way for both to stay alive.’
‘Maybe there’s a relative who could take the girl in?’
A female market vendor, who looked as if she could not stand it any longer, took out 200 won and offered it to the mother. ‘Missus, we’re all struggling to make ends meet here,’ she said. ‘No one will take your daughter in. Here, take this.’
Others spoke out in agreement.
‘She’s right, take her money.’
‘Go on, if you stay on the streets, it will only quicken your death. You’ve got to stay alive for your daughter.’
Whether it was because she couldn’t understand, or because she felt patronised by this offer of charity, the mother kept her hands clenched and refused to take the money. The vendor tried to demonstrate to her that 200 won was worth more than 100 won, but the mother didn’t budge. When the vendor tried to put the money in the daughter’s hand instead, the mother angrily took it and stuffed the money back in the trader’s pocket.
She then took the paper sign from her daughter’s neck and hung it around her own.
‘Clear the way! Clear the way!’ Stern shouting and the blowing of a whistle began to draw nearer. It was a security agent in military uniform. Perhaps someone had notified him. He went straight to the mother and hit her on the shoulders with the palm of his hand. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? Do you think this is one of those rotten Capitalist societies where you can buy and sell human beings like slaves? Get out of here! Take off your fucking sign!’ He snatched at the piece of paper and ripped it up. As the torn paper fell to the ground, the crowd became agitated again.
‘Hey you, she’s got a terminal disease. You should at least find out what’s going on!’ somebody shouted.
Encouraged by this, the anger of the others was stirred, and mocking voices began to call out.
‘You think you’re in charge just because you’re with fucking security? What’s the point of tearing up her sign?’
‘Look at that arsehole, he looks like a fucking rat.’
‘That son of a bitch is the kind of man who will sell off his own wife.’
The agent, absolutely furious, turned to identify the source of the insults.
Another voice rang out: ‘What? Can’t you see us? Open your fucking eyes!’
Spontaneously, the whole square rang with laughter. His face now red with fury, the agent began to take his anger out on the deaf woman. ‘You’re coming with me, you cunt!’ he bellowed. ‘How dare you sell your daughter and defy Socialism? You love money? Are you promoting Capitalism? Try eating bean rice, cunt.’
The young girl had begun to cry, but the man dragged at the woman’s arm as if to break it. She stumbled and strained to hold her ground. The anger of the onlookers was at a climax, yet no one dared to take a step towards a man in military uniform. Then someone approached him and seized his arm. It was an officer, with a first lieutenant’s stripes.
‘I’ll take the girl. That will solve it, right?’
‘What?’ The security agent turned towards the voice, about to strike its owner, but stopped as soon as he registered the officer’s rank.
The lieutenant pulled the security agent away from the woman. He looked very strong. ‘I receive military rations from the state,’ he explained. ‘I’m confident I can take responsibility for the girl. So here, take 100 won for her.’ The officer’s words revealed that he was not buying the daughter for 100 won, but taking on the role of motherhood. In order to make his point clear to the woman, he picked the girl up in his arms.
The mother reacted in the most unexpected way. After she had accepted the 100-won note from the lieutenant, she hesitated for a moment. Then she broke through the crowd and disappeared. The officer, confused, stood there with the girl still in his arms. Had the mother run off for fear that he might change his mind? If so, that was certainly stupid. But perhaps she was mentally ill, which would explain why she had tried to sell her daughter.
The onlookers made wild guesses. Suddenly, someone from the back shouted out, ‘She’s back! Make way! The mother’s here!’ The crowd made a narrow corridor for the returning woman, who was stumbling and out of breath. She was carrying bread, of the very kind that I had been offered just outside the marketplace.
Had she resolved to commit such a wretched act for that miserable packet of bread? Had she not even 100 won to give her daughter for a last meal, as a last act of motherhood?
To my astonishment the mother opened her mouth and began to wail, ‘Forgive me! Forgive your mother! What a wretched woman I am! This is all I can give you before I go.’ She knelt in front of her daughter, sobbing violently and putting pieces of bread into her daughter’s mouth.
‘She’s not deaf and dumb!’
‘She could hear us all along!’
‘How much pain she must feel inside.’
Several in the crowd began to sob. Standing among them, I could not but cry with them.
BECOMING A PIANO
TEACHER
3
I HAD FINISHED speaking but Cho-rin’s shoulders were still shaking. She wiped her wet hands on her robe and raised them up to her eyes again, wiping away more tears.
‘How can Kim Jong-il call himself a great leader? He’s a bad man.’ She sipped some water and blew her nose.
‘You did well to leave that country,’ Cho-rin said. ‘Why would you stay there?’ She turned round to face me, patting her cheeks in embarrassment. ‘I never cry. Really, I never do.’
Composing herself, she continued, ‘How will you get to South Korea? Even North Korean refugees who make it as far as the Embassy in Beijing get arrested at the gate. You hear it on the news quite often. You’ll have to find a safer route.’
She flicked her hair behind her ears, determined that we should work on the problem together. She would take care of Young-min’s whereabouts by contacting Mr Shin, she said, but the immediate problem was my safety. I couldn’t stay in the sauna-motel for ever, and each meal presented a problem in itself. She was not a single woman; she was engaged, and she could not be with me all the time. Whether in finding shelter, or travelling to South Korea, the problem was money. She suddenly looked up and asked, ‘Is there something you can do to earn money?’
I said wryly that since I’d crossed the Tumen River, the only thing I was practised in was looking out for police and keeping under the radar. I added that I could play the piano, not that it would be of any use. But Cho-rin clapped her hands in delight.
‘Really? You can play? You know, like, with both hands?’
Watching Cho-rin flail her arms like a drowning woman, I broke into a grin.
‘Well, yes. Not well enough to play professionally, but I’ve played for friends.’
Cho-rin clapped her hands again and then looked at me in surprise as an idea occurred to her. Her uncle lived in the nearby Xita District, she explained, where there were many Korean-Chinese. In fact, he had been looking for a piano tutor for his son. He was quite wealthy and if I taught his son piano, I would have a place to stay and be able to earn some money on the side. The suggestion made sense to me. As
well as being able to earn some money, the time I spent in Xita, also known as the ‘Korea Town’ of Shenyang, would surely help me find a way to get to South Korea.
Cho-rin pulled her phone out of her pocket and dialled her uncle’s number straight away. She talked to him for over half an hour, blurting out entire sentences in Chinese whenever the conversation seemed to become more tense. When she finally slipped her phone away, I waved my hands dismissively and said, ‘If he says no, it’s fine. I need to leave China as soon as I can anyway.’
‘No, it’s all right! He says I’m to take you to his house tonight.’
In the few hours we had before the meeting, I tried to call Mr Shin several times with the money Cho-rin had given me. I used a public phone because if the Chinese authorities were tapping Mr Shin’s phone, I didn’t want Cho-rin’s mobile number to come up. At around seven in the evening, I finally got through to Mr Shin.
He said that there was still no news from Young-min. When he heard from him, I said, he should stress that Young-min must not return to his cousin’s house, but should instead travel to Shenyang. Mr Shin gave me his wife’s mobile number, in case I might not be able to get through on his. He said that when I had established a way to reach South Korea safely, I should inform them, so that his wife could join me. I asked Mr Shin to please leave his phone connected, because I knew Young-min would be calling back.
That night, Cho-rin and I took a cab to her uncle’s house. Instead of taking the main roads, we seemed to be going through lots of alleyways. Cho-rin explained that the driver was taking a short cut because it was rush hour, but the journey still took over twenty minutes. She paid the fare at the end. It seemed like a fortune: over 25 yuan.
At the entrance to a luxurious apartment building, Cho-rin turned to me and said, very seriously, as though my life depended on it, ‘When my uncle asks, just say you play piano really well. He’s not musical at all, so you don’t have to worry. If you feel uncomfortable about playing, just say your hands hurt. You know how musicians don’t play when their hands are injured – that sort of thing.’
The apartment was on the eighth floor. As Cho-rin had said, her uncle was indeed a wealthy man. The fittings and furnishings were expensive. Unlike Mr Shin’s flat, which had a heated floor covered in old-fashioned linoleum, this house had a marble floor covered with areas of plush carpet. This was only the second private home I had seen in my life with a marble floor.
In North Korea, the most luxurious private homes were in Eundok Village in East Pyongyang, where Kim Jong-il’s closest associates lived. Its surroundings were beautifully landscaped, with many trees and the Daedong River flowing nearby. As the residential area was said to have been constructed as a special favour from Kim Jong-il, it was named ‘Eundok’ (Korean for ‘favour’).
Director Im lived there, and I was often invited into his home. Eundok Village was encircled with electric fencing and patrolled by armed guards. There were six buildings within the compound, and the village had its own diesel generator to provide an uninterrupted electricity supply for its residents. All six buildings had four storeys and were the same rectangular shape and size. The ground floor consisted of garages, and the family apartments were from the first floor upwards. Only one generation of a family lived on each floor. The lifts were made by Mitsubishi in Japan. Director Im lived on the second floor of his building.
The lift doors on the second floor opened directly into his home. The hallway was full of bicycles, tennis rackets and assorted boxes. When you took your shoes off to enter the main living area you put them in a shoe cabinet that reached from the floor to the high ceiling. There was a main corridor in the middle of the apartment, and the doors to the rooms on either side of the corridor faced each other. The first large space was the living room, and the kitchen was at the far end of the corridor. There were two bathrooms, and a total of ten rooms excluding the bathrooms.
The walls of the living room were covered in framed photographs showing Director Im with Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. Three mahogany display cabinets stood against one wall. The cabinets displayed state medals, gold watches and other special gifts, and the wine glasses into which Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il had poured wine for him. One of the items I found most interesting in Director Im’s private study was a telephone. It was a black rotary phone with the red Workers’ Party emblem in the centre of the dial. Director Im explained to me that ordinary phones weren’t as reliable; and besides, they might be bugged. His hotline to Kim Jong-il was an old-fashioned model specially built for this purpose, he explained. Behind the phone there was a small antenna and a red LED light, which came on when there was a call from Kim Jong-il.
The apartments indeed could only have been built as a ‘favour’ from Kim Jong-il. Even in the kitchen, incongruously, there was a large chandelier with countless glittering crystals. Director Im explained that this was a high-end design specially imported from Germany. Each crystal had three hundred and twenty sides, he said, and – just as with diamonds – the cutting of the crystals had a crucial effect on how the light was reflected.
For me, though, the marble floor was the most striking feature of his home. Most ordinary North Korean homes had flooring that was little more than a version of wallpaper. Those who were better off had decorated linoleum flooring or wooden floorboards imported from China or Japan. But that wasn’t what surprised me about the marble floor: before stepping into Director Im’s home, I had thought that marble floors were an exclusively First Class construction feature, which could only be used in sanctified buildings directly related to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, such as the Revolutionary Rooms attached to all schools and workplaces. In these Rooms, students received ideological indoctrination appropriate to their age group so that, as they moved up each year from nursery all the way to the end of university, the entire span of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s formative years would be covered by the sessions. For working adults, various kinds of political and self-criticism sessions took place in the Rooms, the workplace equivalents being covered with photographs of Kim Jong-il conducting relevant on-site guidance. Revolutionary Rooms nationwide had to have their displays updated at least once every three years, for which purpose funds for the maintenance of the cult of Kim were set aside. When I asked about Director Im’s marble floor, he crouched down and rapped it with his knuckles, explaining that it was made from pink Italian marble. Although Cho-rin’s uncle also had a marble floor in his apartment, it was yellowish and looked as if it had lost its original colour. And instead of photographs taken with Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, there were just three paintings hanging on the living-room wall. Although I couldn’t see a stove, the apartment was comfortably heated. In each of the four corners of the living room there stood a traditional Chinese vase glazed in red and as tall as a grown man. Dark brown curtains were draped from the huge windows. When I sat on the black leather couch, I sank into its cushioned depths.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said the uncle. He was a man in his early fifties, wearing a brown cardigan. His gaze was gentle, and his lips were plump. His accent was not very different from Mr Shin’s. As he had already heard my story from Cho-rin, he seemed uninterested in hearing further details. That was a relief.
He asked, ‘So you used to be a pianist?’
‘Yes.’ I tried to stick to a short answer at Cho-rin’s earlier insistence, but uneasy with this exaggeration of my piano-playing skills, I felt I needed to provide more of an explanation: ‘My music teacher was a famous violinist. Before he moved to North Korea during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he was a member of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. I never trained to be a professional pianist, but I learned to play a little from my teacher.’
The uncle looked over at Cho-rin.
She said, ‘Yes, that’s right, his teacher was a famous musician. That’s wonderful, isn’t it? Just like you, Uncle, you’re a successful businessman, but, to be honest, you can’t claim to be a world-class business expert, now can you?’
She glanced at her hands as she spoke, and looked a bit uncomfortable.
The uncle said, ‘Yes, yes, Cho-rin, you’ve already said that. Well, can you play something for us?’
As he rose from the sofa, Cho-rin rushed to my side. ‘Do you think you can play? Are you sure your hands are not injured? Uncle, can’t you just take my word for it?’
‘No, I can’t.’
Cho-rin assumed a mock-angry expression. It was clear that they were very close, as he laughed heartily at her pretend petulance.
Passing a corridor that led off to the right of the living room, we entered a room in which there stood a black upright Yamaha. It looked far more impressive than the Yamaha we had had at home in North Korea. I tested the pedals. My foot was met not with a smooth resistance, but some kind of scraping sensation. The piano seemed never to have been played.
I proceeded to play a scale from the lower notes all the way to the top. Fortunately, the instrument was not too much out of tune, although I was sure it had not been touched since it was bought. I explained that a piano was a living, breathing thing. If it were not looked after regularly, the changes in weather would affect its tone. I saw Cho-rin smiling broadly, looking pleased with my demonstration of expertise.
‘Play us a song!’ she urged me.
What should I play? I decided to go for an easy piece, ‘Autumn Whispers’ by Richard Clayderman, which I could play from memory. Already, images from home filled my mind and one in particular made me smile. Once, on a state holiday, I had played ‘Autumn Whispers’ in a mini-concert I had put on for guests at our home. The security agent responsible for my residential area, who must have received a complaint from nearby, came to break up the party. In North Korea, you were not allowed to enjoy or share foreign culture unless the performance was authorised, as in the case of students studying Western music at university level for example. But even for them, this was supposed to remain a restricted privilege. Putting on a performance for laypeople, as I had been doing with my private concert, was strictly prohibited.
Dear Leader Page 26