by Hyeonseo Lee
‘Omma.’ I started laughing. ‘It’s a machine.’
The travel card I gave her also flummoxed her. When we got on a bus, she swiped it over the reader, as I had shown her, and a mechanized woman’s voice said ‘hwanseung imnida’ (transfer), meaning that the fare had been paid.
‘Do I need to reply?’ my mother asked loudly.
Later, in the street, she asked me if the kids she kept seeing were from South Korea’s equivalent of some sort of Socialist Youth League.
‘No, why do you say that?’
‘They salute each other, like this.’ She held up her palm.
‘Omma, that’s called a “high five”.’
One evening, as we were strolling after dinner she said: ‘It wasn’t all bull.’
‘What wasn’t, Omma?’
‘All these cars. All these lights. I’d seen them in the illegal South Korean TV dramas, but I’d always thought it was propaganda, that they’d brought all the cars in the city to the same street where they were filming.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s astonishing.’
Chapter 52
‘I am prepared to die’
That September 2010, I was accepted by the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies for an undergraduate course in Chinese and English that would start in spring the following year. Min-ho had an apartment of his own. My mother looked for work so that she could help support me. Her previously privileged position of authority in North Korea – at the government bureau in Hyesan – counted for nothing in Seoul, so she took a job as a cleaner in a small motel where rooms were charged by the hour. She received board and lodging at the motel, with one day off per month. She was getting old, and wasn’t used to the hard physical labour. Within a few weeks in the job, she was changing sheets on a bed when she slipped a disc in her spine, collapsed in agony, and soon after had to have surgery.
My mother’s brave attempt at a new life in the South began to falter. It didn’t help that she saw Min-ho struggling, too.
Among the 27,000 North Koreans in the South, two kinds of life have been left behind: the wretched life of persecution and hunger, and the manageable life that was not so bad. People in the first group adjust rapidly. Their new life, however challenging, could only be better. For the people in the second group, life in the South is far more daunting. It often makes them yearn for the simpler, more ordered existence they left behind, where big decisions are taken for them by the state, and where life is not a fierce competition.
My mother, who had arranged the paperwork for her own death before leaving Hyesan, had also left money behind with Aunt Tall, on the understanding that she might return. She began to miss her brothers and sisters so much that she would weep for them every night after work. She started endlessly recalling tales of the long-ago antics of Uncle Opium, or the hardships of Uncle Poor, or the business tricks of Aunt Pretty. Then, finally, one night, she came out with it.
‘I want to go home.’
‘Omma.’ It was what I’d dreaded to hear. ‘You can’t. You know what they’ll do.’
‘I am prepared to die,’ she said, stoically gazing into space. ‘I want to die at home.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘I never see the sun,’ she said. It was winter, and dark when she got up for work, and dark when she finished. ‘Did I come here for this? There’s no meaning here, no future.’
We had this conversation in one form or another for the next few months. She never once accused me of doing the wrong thing by persuading her to defect, but I started to feel that I had made a terrible mistake. I had taken an enormous risk with our lives, and at a great cost in effort and money, so that we could be together. But despite my best intentions, my mother was now miserable. She was caught in a dreadful dilemma: she longed to go home, but then she would be separated from me once more.
At first I encouraged her to be patient. It wasn’t easy to adjust to life here, I said, but she would succeed. It would just take a little time. But when she started saying that she wanted to die in the North, I knew I could not ignore her.
With a heavy heart I told her I would help her get back there safely, if that’s what she truly wanted. Over several weeks, I weighed the risks. It was unbelievable that after all we’d been through I was now trying to figure a way of guiding my mother all the way back to North Korea. But if her mind was made up, what choice did I have?
The return trip to the North would not be nearly as arduous as our long journey to Seoul. We could get back to the border at Changbai easily, as South Korean tourists, and I could hire a broker to take her over the river. But she had to be sure – really, absolutely sure – that she could cover her tracks when she was back there.
I lay on my bed, unable to sleep, staring at the beige blanket of the sky over Seoul. Am I really going to do this?
‘Omma,’ I said the next day. ‘If they find out you’ve been in China, they’ll arrest you and beat you. If they find out you’ve been here …’ I didn’t need to say anything. We both knew what her fate would be. I looked her in the eye. ‘I need to know your plan will work.’
‘It will work,’ she said. ‘I know exactly who to bribe at the records office and he’s all right. Then your Aunt Pretty will help me move to a new city. No one will ever know I’ve been away.’
That seemed to decide it. Min-ho was very unhappy about this. He missed home as much as our omma did. He was having adjustment problems of his own, and didn’t want to lose his mother, too.
Over the next week I began to plan her journey. But when I tried discussing dates and practicalities with her she became reticent, distracted, as if she were preoccupied with some inner turmoil.
At the same time, I was trying to convince Min-ho to try for university. He was restless and disaffected. My greatest fear was that he’d turn to crime. Smuggling in North Korea may have been illegal, but the police gave it a nod and a wink, and, informally, it was a socially accepted form of business. But in South Korea, society would not tolerate it. The idea of college terrified Min-ho. He looked brought down whenever I mentioned it. His worthless North Korean education had put him years behind other students his age. I told him to take a year to think about it.
He had already found a job on a construction site, which he tackled with his usual doggedness, working so hard that he was promoted to team leader within weeks. After six months, however, he quit, telling me that if he didn’t do something now, he’d spend the rest of his life on building sites. He would try for university. I was enormously relieved and pleased by this, and it was quickly followed by more good news.
‘I won’t go back,’ my mother said abruptly one morning.
I’d guessed she’d been having doubts, and had stayed quiet hoping they’d take root.
‘I’d miss you and your brother too much,’ she said. ‘I’d be able to see your aunts and uncles and your cousins, but I’d miss you so much that I’d be in double agony.’ She’d been staying at my apartment that night. Later, when she had gone to work, I cried miserably. My relief was marred by the fact that I’d condemned her to experience loss and regret for the rest of her life. I was acutely aware that I had done this to her.
By the spring of 2011, it had been nine months since my mother and Min-ho had been living freely in Seoul. Just when I thought both of them were beginning to settle down and adjust to the reality of their new lives, another drama occurred that almost tore us apart all over again.
Min-ho had re-established contact with Yoon-ji, his fiancée, and called her regularly. He wasn’t giving up on her, and over many conversations had convinced her to join him in the South, making all the complex preparations with brokers to get her across China. I did not deter him. He knew the dangers. But he had his heart set.
He applied for his passport, got a Chinese visa, and went to get her, but by the time he reached Changbai, she had changed her mind. She didn’t want to create problems for her parents, she said.
A few days later, on my first day at universi
ty, he called me. It was a beautiful spring day. I was crossing the campus, looking at a map to locate my faculty building.
‘I’m in Changbai.’ His voice rang strange, as if we were in a dream. ‘I’m looking across at Hyesan right now.’
‘You shouldn’t go that close. Someone might recognize you.’
‘Nuna, I’m very sorry to tell you this. I’m going back.’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘I cut my hair today, dumped my jeans, and bought trousers that look North Korean.’
My blood froze. ‘What? When?’
‘Now. I’m crossing back now.’
I screamed. ‘Min-ho, you can’t.’
‘Yoon-ji’s mother will take care of everything. It’ll be like I never left.’
I tried to focus. I had to stop him. I felt a horrible tension building in my head.
‘Min-ho, listen to me. Once you go over, you can never come back. Think about this.’
‘I have no future in Seoul,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if I can handle college. In Hyesan, I can marry Yoon-ji. I know what to do to make money.’
‘You’re not sure, because you’ve just arrived and it’s still scary. But after a year or two, you’ll be fine.’
He fell silent and I could hear him breathing deeply, that trick he had when he wished something wasn’t happening.
‘Min-ho. You’re my brother. I can’t lose you again now. You’re the man in our family. Think of Omma. What will this do to her? We’ve had a hell of a journey, and we’re still not finished. It’s hard, but we can overcome this. You and me, we’re young. We can do anything. Remember how hard it was to get here? But we did it. You want to throw that away?’
‘What about Yoon-ji?’ His voice was faint and so sad.
It was the dilemma all three of us had. Every choice we made cut us off permanently from someone we loved.
‘She’ll be all right.’ I came in hard, addressing what I guessed lay behind this – his underlying fear that he would never find a woman in South Korea interested in him. ‘There are many girls here. I have friends. I’ll start introducing you. They know you’re my hero.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Or we can go to America together. We can get our degrees and go to America. There’s uncertainty in Korea, but America’s the country of freedom.’
‘America? Why the hell would I go there?’
‘We can do anything, Min-ho. We can go anywhere. We are free people. We only have to set our heart on it, and we can do it.’
We talked like this for over an hour. Slowly he came back to reality. The whole time I was walking in circles in the middle of a quadrangle, with students flowing around me, chatting, pushing bicycles.
‘I think of the path along the river all the time,’ he said. ‘I miss knowing what I’m doing.’
‘I know.’
‘But you’re right. I’ll come back. I’ll try again.’
He hung up. I found a bench and sat down. My whole body was shaking. I felt like a pilot who’d narrowly averted a plane crash.
Chapter 53
The beauty of a free mind
Not long after my family had arrived, Ok-hee introduced me to an organization called PSCORE (an acronym for ‘People for Successful Corean Reunification’), which helps improve the lives of North Korean defectors. One Saturday evening she and I joined a group of PSCORE volunteers for a night out in Hongdae, a district of crowded bars thumping with music and clubs popular with Seoul’s students. The others in our group were South Koreans and, curiously, three young male Westerners. At dinner I found myself sitting next to one of them. Ever since meeting Dick Stolp in Laos, I was much more curious about Westerners. If even just a few of them were as wonderful as Dick, I was interested to meet more. And I confess that I was also struck by how fine-looking this one was, next to me. He was fair-haired, with chestnut-brown eyes and a friendly, unassuming manner. He was in his mid-twenties, I guessed.
His name was Brian, he said. He was a graduate student at Yonsei University in Seoul. He asked where I was from.
‘A city called Hyesan,’ I said matter-of-factly, as if everyone knew where that was, and watched with amusement as he scratched his chin.
‘Hyesan, Hyesan,’ he muttered. He was trying to think where it was on the map. ‘That’s weird. I know this country pretty well.’
‘It’s in the North,’ I said. ‘Near China.’
He turned to me with a look of wonder. ‘You’re kidding me.’ I was the first North Korean he’d ever met.
He told me he was from Wisconsin. He saw the blank look on my face. ‘In the USA.’
We spent the rest of the evening deep in conversation. I was struck by how open and honest he was about everything. He spoke without guile or evasiveness. He wasn’t defensive, or status-conscious. I felt completely at ease with this stranger. I was honest with him, too, until the very end of the evening. Foolishly, I’d brought up the subject of age.
‘Well, how old are you?’ he laughed.
‘Twenty-five.’ It was an instant, reflexive lie. I’d snapped straight back into that cynical mode of calculating every benefit. It also came from years of lying about my identity. I’d shaved a few years off so that I’d seem more attractive to him. I didn’t feel too guilty, and didn’t imagine we would meet again.
What I did not expect was that Brian would call me, that we would start dating, and that a few months after meeting, we would start a serious relationship. That small lie did matter now. I kept putting off telling him the truth until it became unbearable. I had to get it over with.
‘Brian, I’ve got to apologize,’ I said, while we were walking in the street. ‘I lied to you. I’m not twenty-five. I’m twenty-nine.’
‘Oh.’ He gave me a puzzled look. ‘I don’t care about that. But I want you to know that you can always be honest with me. I’m not going to judge you.’
Brian was the first to show me a free intelligence, with a humorous, sceptical mind that took nothing as given. It made me open unexamined thoughts of my own. He made me realize that the wider world cares about the suffering in North Korea, and is well informed about it, too. His attitude emboldened me to confront the stultifying prejudice in South Korea against defectors – something they would never experience in the United States. Most defectors I knew in the South hid their identities out of fear of being seen as low-status. I was damned if I was going to hide mine. Now that my family was safely with me, I had nothing to hide.
But Brian also presented me with a problem I had not foreseen. It wasn’t just South Korean prejudices I was confronting. I had to change some defectors’ attitudes, too, and some of them were very close to home.
My mother and Min-ho knew that I’d got romantically involved with someone. They wanted to meet him, and wondered why I kept making excuses, not even telling them his name. As my relationship with Brian deepened, I realized they would have to know. In the end, I decided shock would be the best therapy.
And so it was that Brian was introduced to my mother and to Min-ho in a restaurant, and they found themselves face to face with one of the reviled Yankee jackals of North Korean propaganda. We sat down in silence. My mother, normally the epitome of good manners, gaped at him with her mouth open. She and my brother looked stunned and offended. I knew what they were thinking. A well-known saying in North Korea goes: ‘Just as a jackal cannot become a lamb, so American imperialists cannot change their rapacious nature.’ I acted as interpreter. After a brief and excruciating dinner, Brian left as soon as he politely could. Min-ho remained silent and stared at the table. My mother said only one thing, muttering to herself: ‘I’ve lived too long. I’m too old for this shit.’
Later Min-ho admitted to me that he’d hated Brian on sight. He was a miguk nom, he said. An American bastard.
I did not feel bad for offending them. I felt bad for Brian, who was decent and kind and had done nothing to deserve their contempt. But I knew I would achieve nothing by having a row with my mo
ther and Min-ho. They had only been out of North Korea a few months. Some convictions would not change overnight.
Slowly, I started speaking out in defence of defectors, and about the human rights abuses in North Korea – first, in defector group meetings, then in small public speeches, then on a new television show called Now on My Way to Meet You, in which all the guests were female defectors, given new clothes in vibrant colours to dispel public perceptions of North Koreans as shabby and pitiful. The show had a big impact in transforming attitudes in South Korea toward defectors.
I started thinking deeply about human rights. One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist. This is also why most people escape because they’re hungry or in trouble – not because they’re craving liberty. Many defectors hiding in China even baulk at the idea of going to South Korea – they’d see it as a betrayal of their country and the legacy of the Great Leader. If the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their rights, of individual freedoms and democracy, the game would be up for the regime in Pyongyang. The people would realize that full human rights are exercised and enjoyed by one person only – the ruling Kim. He is the only figure in North Korea who exercises freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, his right not to be tortured, imprisoned, or executed without trial, and his right to proper healthcare and food.