by Hyeonseo Lee
A door opened in my mind.
He’s an eighty-two-year-old man, I thought. He grew old and weak. He was human after all. I sat there listening to my friend’s sobs, but my eyes were dry. I was too raw with grief for my father to spend my tears on the Great Leader.
The next morning the entire school gathered in front of the school building. We stood in long, regimented lines. The sky was a milky blue and the day was warming up uncomfortably. Emotional speeches were made by the headmaster and the teachers, all of whom were choking with tears, to a background accompaniment of piped funeral music. Hour after hour it went on. I had felt sad at first, but after three hours of standing under the hot sun, I was becoming thirsty and tired.
Nobody had ordered us to cry. No one had hinted that if we didn’t cry we would fall under suspicion. But we knew our tears were being demanded. From all around me came the sounds of sniffing, sobbing and wailing. It looked as if everyone was beside themselves with grief. My survival instinct kicked in. If I didn’t cry like everyone else I’d be in trouble. So I rubbed my face in false distress, surreptitiously spat on my fingertips, and dabbed my eyes. I made a gasping noise that I hoped sounded like I was heaving with despair.
After a long time doing this, I felt I could not stand there for much longer. The sun now was overhead. It was very warm. So I stumbled a little. The teachers thought I was about to faint, so they put me in the ambulance that was there on standby. That was a relief.
The next day there was a similar event joined by all the city’s schools at the Victorious Battle of Pochonbo Memorial in Hyesan Park. This time several thousand students and teachers joined in the sobbing and the wailing. The grief seemed to be getting more extreme by the hour. A kind of hysteria was spreading across the city. Our schooling stopped. The steel and lumber mills, the factories, shops and markets closed. Every citizen had to participate in daily mass events to demonstrate their inconsolable sorrow. Day after day a teacher took us into the hills to pick wild flowers to place before the bronze statue of Kim Il-sung in Hyesan Park. After a few days, every flower had been picked, but we had to find them from somewhere. To turn up with one flower was an insult to the Great Leader.
On one of these searches for flowers a swarm of dragonflies flew alongside us in the field.
‘Look.’ In a voice full of wonder the teacher said: ‘Even the dragonflies are sad at the Great Leader’s death.’
She was being serious, and we took the comment uncritically.
After the mourning period, as I’d feared might happen, punishment awaited those who had shed too few tears. On the day classes resumed the entire student body gathered in front of the school to hurl criticism and abuse at a girl accused of faking her tears. The girl was terrified, and this time really crying. I felt sorry for her, but my main emotion was relief. As a fake crier myself, I was just glad no one had seen through my performance.
Many adults across the city were similarly accused and the Bowibu made a spate of arrests. It wasn’t long before notices began appearing, giving the time and place for clusters of public executions.
It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go. Factories would send their workers, to ensure a large crowd. I always tried to avoid attending, but on one occasion that summer I made an exception, because I knew one of the men being killed. Many people in Hyesan knew him. You might think the execution of an acquaintance is the last thing you’d want to see. In fact, people made excuses not to go if they didn’t know the victim. But if they knew the victim, they felt obliged to go, as they would to a funeral.
He was in his twenties and always seemed to have money. He was popular with the girls, and had followers among the city’s hoodlums. His crime was helping people to escape to China and selling banned goods. But his real offence was to continue his illegal activity during the mourning period following Kim Il-sung’s death.
He was to be shot along with three others at Hyesan Airport, a common site for executions. The three men were brought out of a van before a large crowd waiting in the glaring heat. Immediately, people around me began to whisper. The popular guy had to be lifted up and dragged to the post by a group of police, with the tips of his feet scraping along in the dust. He seemed half dead already.
Each of the three had his head, chest and waist tied to a stake. His hands and feet were tied together behind the stake. A perfunctory people’s trial opened, in which the judge announced that the criminals had confessed their crimes. He asked if they had any last words. He wasn’t expecting a response, since all three had been gagged and had stones pushed into their mouths to stop them cursing the regime with their final breath.
Three uniformed marksmen then lined up opposite each of them, and took aim. The marksmen’s faces were flushed, I noticed. Executioners were known to drink alcohol beforehand. The noise of the reports ricocheted in the dry air – three shots, the first in the head; the second in the chest; the third in the stomach. When the shot hit the popular guy’s head, it exploded, leaving a fine pink mist. His family had been forced to watch from the front row.
Chapter 15
Girlfriend of a hoodlum
When I turned fifteen I began attending a special class for girls only, where we learned to knit and keep house. We should have been learning about sex.
All of us were astonishingly ignorant about men, and about the most basic facts of reproduction. For all its interference in our lives, the Party was extraordinarily bashful when it came to telling us how life itself was made. This was despite the fact that a teenage pregnancy could land a girl in a terrible situation – she’d have to marry immediately to avoid trouble. An abortion would have been difficult to arrange and probably would not even have been suggested. Instead she’d have been forced to give the baby up for adoption, or to a state orphanage.
I believed that I could get pregnant if I kissed a man, or held hands with him. My girl friends thought the same. The boys’ ignorance of sex was just as bad. I once saw a group of youths in their early teens near the pharmacy opposite Hyesan Station blowing up condoms as if they were balloons, and kicking them about in the street. If someone had told them what those items were for, they would have run away red-faced.
With such an utter lack of sexual awareness, none of us blossoming girls showed off our maturing bodies, or flirted, or teased boys at school. The North Korean brassiere is shaped like a blouse designed to flatten rather than enhance our breasts. One of the girls in my class had large breasts. Instead of being envied by the girls, she was teased.
I finally learned about the sexual act from an unexpected source. A girl friend from school invited me home one afternoon to watch an illegal South Korean drama on video. When we turned on the recorder, however, we found that one of the adults of the house had left another type of video inside. It took me a minute to figure out what I was seeing. The screen filled with a jumble of limbs and intimate body parts, accompanied by rhythmic grunting and moaning. My friend started chuckling at my shocked face. I had never even seen anyone kiss in a North Korean movie. Pornography, in Party propaganda, was a pernicious foreign corruption. But this ‘love-making’ video, as she called it, had been made in Pyongyang, for sale abroad and for circulation among elite Party cadres. I would not have believed it if the ‘actors’ hadn’t spoken in such familiar accents. I lost my innocence that day. To my mind, my country did, too.
Like my other friends, when I menstruated the first time I went through three emotions in sharp succession: shock, embarrassment and absolute panic. I had to use my wits to figure out what to do. Incredibly, most of us handled it, without telling anyone or asking our mothers for advice. My mother, the most sensible woman I knew, offered me none, just as my grandmother, I’m sure, had given her none.
It was at the height of my panic during my first menstrual cycle that one of the girls in class told me she’d seen something that had scared her at a public toilet near our school. S
he wanted to show me. We crept in there to take a look together. The place was dripping, dim, and stinking. Next to the hole of the squat toilet was a bloodied white plastic bag. Inside was a dead baby with a tiny blue-pink face. The mother must have given birth there and fled. The umbilical cord and the placenta lay next to it. I was shocked to the core and didn’t sleep that night.
That year, 1995, I dated my first boyfriend. He was four years older than me, and a hoodlum. His name was Tae-chul. He was tall, thin, and wore a Japanese casual jacket, the height of sophistication in Hyesan. He had a conceited little half-smile I found attractive. Every North Korean city has hoodlums. These are not violent criminals, but young people with the kind of personality that attracts followers and who often deal in banned goods. There is quite a lot of low-level crime they can get away with, as long as they do nothing that verges on the political and attracts the eyes of the Bowibu.
He had money. He was also in the police academy and was training to be a policeman. Just walking with him thrilled me because of the attention I was getting. In fact, after he waited for me a few times outside the school gate, the rumours started flying about us. This was quite a serious matter, because when the word gets out that a girl has been dating, it’s not easy for her to find another match.
I worried about this, but I liked him. I was proud that he wanted to go out with me when so many other girls wanted him. We would go to his house to listen to South Korean pop cassettes and play the guitar and accordion together. Like any other boyfriend and girlfriend in North Korea of this age, we did not even kiss. Holding hands was as far as it went. Even then we were discreet. Our families were not aware of our romance and did not consider it improper for me to be at his house. My mother would have had a stroke if she’d known he was my boyfriend.
That year I found my duties with the Socialist Youth League more oppressive than ever. In spring we had to help plant rice saplings, in the summer we weeded and spread fertilizer, and in autumn came the harvest, which students and workers from all over the country helped with. This mass enterprise, in fields of flying red banners, was the epitome of communist idealism.
In the summer we were also ordered to dig tunnels around our school. The entire country was being mobilized, and everyone was on a war footing. Sirens wailed almost daily, and everybody dropped what they were doing and dashed to and fro in frenzy, practising air-raid drills in case of an attack. America and South Korea were about to launch a nuclear strike, we were told. War could break out at any minute. The thought of nuclear war terrified me. My mother panicked and gave a lot of stuff away. She gave all our spare blankets and pillows to Uncle Poor and his family on the collective farm.
The boys dug frantically with shovels and the girls shifted the earth. I hated every minute of this. If war started while we were at school, several hundred students were supposed to hide in the warren of tunnels. I was worried that our amateur engineering might prove disastrous, and bury us alive. I was sceptical, too, of whether these tunnels were deep enough to protect us from a nuclear strike. Years later I discovered that the propaganda had an element of truth. The United States had actually been considering air strikes against our country’s nuclear plants.
After one of these tedious and exhausting days of digging and air-raid drills, I went to my friend Sun-i’s house after school. She was in the tight bunch of friends I hung out with, but this was the first time I’d been to her home. Usually she came to mine.
‘Shall we eat something?’ I said. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘I’m not sure what we’ve got.’ She sounded vague.
‘Anything.’
‘We don’t have much.’
This annoyed me. You’re always getting snacks at my house. ‘I don’t need a meal,’ I said.
Sun-i hesitated. She was embarrassed.
‘Come here,’ she said, leading me into the kitchen. Four pots sat on the stove. She slid the lid off one. ‘Look. I can’t give you this.’
Inside the pot were thick dark-green objects. She put the lid back on before I could ask what they were, but I could tell it wasn’t normal food. On the way home, I realized they might have been corn stalks.
Why would her mother be cooking such a thing instead of rice?
Chapter 16
‘By the time you read this, the five of us will no longer exist in this world’
My mother came home from work looking tired and distracted. She hadn’t been sleeping much since my father had died and had more lines beneath her eyes and around her mouth. It had been months since I’d seen her smile. But at least she was able to provide for us through her small business deals. We had food and money. Her job at the local government bureau also meant that she had access to farm produce managed by her office. This gave her an opportunity for graft that she was expected to exercise. Soon after Kim Il-sung’s death the government had stopped paying salaries. It continued to give out ration coupons through the workplace, but these were becoming increasingly worthless. For some reason there were fewer and fewer goods to exchange for them.
She’d brought home a letter received by one of her colleagues. It was from the woman’s sister who lived in North Hamgyong Province, a neighbouring province to the east of ours. My mother wanted to show it to us.
‘I need you and Min-ho to know something. People are having a hard time. You ask me for this and complain we don’t have that. Not everyone has what we have.’
She handed me the letter.
Dear Sister,
By the time you read this, the five of us will no longer exist in this world. We have not eaten for a few weeks. We are emaciated, though recently our bodies have become bloated. We are waiting to die. My one hope before I go is to eat some corn cake.
My first response was puzzlement.
Why hadn’t they eaten for weeks? This was one of the most prosperous countries in the world. Every evening the news showed factories and farms producing in abundance, well-fed people enjoying leisure time, and the department stores in Pyongyang filled with goods. And why was this woman’s last wish to eat corn cake – ‘poor man’s cake’? Shouldn’t she want to see her sister one last time?
The realization was slow in coming.
I thought of how offhand I’d been with my friend Sun-i because she hadn’t offered me a snack at her house. I was mortified.
Her family was struggling to find food.
A few days later, I witnessed famine for the first time.
I was at the market outside Wiyeon Station in Hyesan and saw a woman lying on her side on the ground with a baby in her arms. She was young, in her twenties. The baby, a boy, was about two years old, and staring at his mother. They were pale and skeletal, and dressed in rags. The woman’s face was caked with filth and her hair badly matted. She looked sick. To my astonishment people were walking past her and the baby as if they were invisible.
I could not ignore her. I put a 100-won note on the baby’s lap. I thought it was hopeless to give it to the mother. Her eyes were clouded and not focusing. She wasn’t seeing me. I guessed she was close to death. The money would have bought food for a couple of days.
‘I rescued a baby today,’ I told my mother when I got home. I thought she would be proud to know that I had cared while others had walked by.
‘What do you mean?’
I told her what I had done.
She dropped what she was doing and turned to me, highly annoyed. ‘Are you completely stupid? How can a baby buy anything? Some thief will have snatched that note straight off him. You should have just bought food for them.’
She was right, and I felt responsible.
After that I started thinking a lot about charity. Sharing what we had made us good communists, but at the same time it seemed futile. People had so little, and had to take care of their own families first. I could spare the 100-won note I’d given to the baby and his mother, but I realized it would have solved their problem only for a couple of days. This thought depressed me utterly.
Food was not the only thing in short supply. There was no fertilizer for crops. In the villages children had to bring a quota of their own excrement to school for use as fertilizer. Families locked their outhouses in case thieves stole what little they had. There was no fuel. The steel and lumber mills fell idle. Factory chimneys stopped puffing smoke, and the city streets fell silent and empty during the day. The larches and pines that made the foothills of the mountains so beautiful began to disappear. The landscape was being denuded of trees. People were foraging for fuel as a freezing wind swept down from Manchuria with the onset of winter. Power cuts became more frequent, to the point where the electricity hardly came on at all. To light our home in the evening my mother made a lamp from a pot of diesel with a strip of cotton as a wick. This gave off such a dirty smoke that Min-ho and I would have a circle of soot around our mouths.
One cold morning early in winter, a few weeks before the river froze, I took a walk in the sunshine along the riverside path and saw what looked like a rag gliding in the slow current. Then I saw that the rag had an upturned human face. The eyes were open. I watched in horror as it passed, heading downriver past my house. Just before dawn, before people on the Chinese bank would notice, the border guards had been retrieving corpses from the water and covering them with straw. They were people who had tried to cross somewhere upriver and were too weak to make it. The current could be fast after it had rained in the mountains.