Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

This William Collins paperback edition published 2016

Copyright © Hyeonseo Lee 2015

Hyeonseo Lee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Maps by John Gilkes

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Source ISBN: 9780007554850

Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007554867

Version: 2016-03-02

Praise for Hyeonseo Lee:

‘Stirring and brave … true, committed, unvarnished and honest. Lee has made her own life the keyhole to the present, inside and outside of North Korea’ Scotsman

‘Remarkable bravery fluently recounted’ Kirkus

‘Hyeonseo Lee brought the human consequences of global inaction on North Korea to the world’s doorstep … Against all odds she escaped, survived, and had the courage to speak out’

Samantha Power, US representative to the United Nations

‘I have spoken with countless numbers of defectors over the years. When I first met Hyeonseo Lee, the unflinching manner in which she told her story, although full of sadness and hurt, was inspirational. That is the story now written in this book … Every time she navigated treacherous terrain and overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles, she had to change her name to protect her new identity. She became the Girl with Seven Names … But one thing that she held on to was her humanity, ever stronger as she continuously sublimated her hardships into hope’

Jang Jin-sung, founder of New Focus International and author of Dear Leader: Poet, Spy, Escapee – A Look Inside North Korea

‘This is a powerful story of an escapee from North Korea. In the hallowed meeting rooms of the United Nations in New York, ambassadors from North Korea recently sought to shout down stories like this. But these voices will not be silenced. Eventually freedom will be restored. History will vindicate Hyeonseo Lee and those like her for the risks they ran so that their bodies and their minds could be free. And so that we could know the truth’

The Honourable Michael Kirby, Chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights Abuses in North Korea, 2013–14

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

MAPS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

Part One: The Greatest Nation on Earth

1. A train through the mountains

2. The city at the edge of the world

3. The eyes on the wall

4. The lady in black

5. The man beneath the bridge

6. The red shoes

7. Boomtown

8. The secret photograph

9. To be a good communist

10. ‘Rocky island’

11. ‘The house is cursed’

12. Tragedy at the bridge

13. Sunlight on dark water

14. ‘The great heart has stopped beating’

15. Girlfriend of a hoodlum

16. ‘By the time you read this, the five of us will no longer exist in this world’

17. The lights of Changbai

18. Over the ice

Part Two: To the Heart of the Dragon

19. A Visit to Mr Ahn

20. Home truths

21. The suitor

22. The wedding trap

23. Shenyang girl

24. Guilt call

25. The men from the South

26. Interrogation

27. The plan

28. The gang

29. The comfort of moonlight

30. The biggest, brashest city in Asia

31. Career woman

32. A connection to Hyesan

33. The teddy-bear conversations

34. The tormenting of Min-ho

35. The love shock

36. Destination Seoul

Part Three: Journey into Darkness

37. ‘Welcome to Korea’

38. The women

39. House of Unity

40. The learning race

41. Waiting for

42. A place of ghosts and wild dogs

43. An impossible dilemma

44. Journey into night

45. Under a vast Asian sky

46. Lost in Laos

47. Whatever it takes

48. The kindness of strangers

49. Shuttle diplomacy

50. Long wait for freedom

51. A series of small miracles

52. ‘I am prepared to die’

53. The beauty of a free mind

EPILOGUE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PICTURE SECTION

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Author’s Note

To protect relatives and friends still in North Korea, I have changed some names in this book and withheld other details. Otherwise, all the events described happened as I remembered or was told about them.

Introduction
13 February 2013

Long Beach, California

My name is Hyeonseo Lee.

It is not the name I was born with, nor one of the names forced on me, at different times, by circumstance. But it is the one I gave myself, once I’d reached freedom. Hyeon means sunshine. Seo means good fortune. I chose it so that I would live my life in light and warmth, and not return to the shadow.

I am standing in the wings of a large stage, listening to the hundreds of people in the auditorium. A woman has just blushed my face with a soft brush and a microphone is being attached to me. I worry that it will pick up the sound of my heart, which is thumping in my ears. Someone asks me if I’m ready.

‘I’m ready,’ I say, though I do not feel it.

The next thing I know I’m hearing an amplified announcement. A voice is saying my name. I am being introduced.

A noise like the sea rises in the auditorium. Many hands are clapping. My nerves begin to flutter wildly.

I’m stepping onto the stage.

I feel terrified suddenly. My legs have turned to paper. The spotlights are faraway suns, dazzling me. I can’t make out any faces in the audience.

Somehow I motion my body toward the centre of the stage. I inhale slowly to steady my breathing, and swallow hard.

This is the first time I will tell my story in English, a language still new to me. The journey to this moment has been a long one.

The audience is silent.

I begin to speak.

I hear my voice trembling. I’m telling them about the girl who grew up believing her nation to be the greatest on earth, and who witnessed her first public execution at the age of seven. I’m telling them about the night she fled across a frozen river, and how she realized, too late, that she could never go home to her family. I describe the consequences of that night and the terrible events that followed, years later.

Twice I feel tears coming. I pause for an instant, and blink them back.

Among those of us who were born in North Korea and who have escaped it, the story I am telling is not an uncommon one. But I can feel the impact it is having on the people in the audience at this conference. They are shocked. They are probably asking themselves why a country such as mine still exists in the world.

Perhaps it would be even harder for them to understand that I still love my country and miss it very much. I miss its snowy mountains in winter, the smell of kerosene and burning coal. I miss my childhood there, the safety of my father’s embrace, and sleeping on the heated floor. I should be comfortable with my new life, but I’m still the girl from Hyesan who longs to eat noodles with her family at their favourite restaurant. I miss my bicycle and the view across the river into China.

Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey. Even for those who have suffered unimaginably there and have escaped hell, life in the free world can be so challenging that many struggle to come to terms with it and find happiness. A small number of them even give up, and return to live in that dark place, as I was tempted to do, many times.

My reality, however, is that I cannot go back. I may dream about freedom in North Korea, but nearly seventy years after its creation, it remains as closed and as cruel as ever. By the time it might ever be safe for me to return, I will probably be a stranger in my own land.

As I read back through this book, I see that it is a story of my awakening, a long and difficult coming of age. I have come to accept that as a North Korean defector I am an outsider in the world. An exile. Try as I may to fit into South Korean society, I do not feel that I will ever fully be accepted as a South Korean. More important, I don’t think I myself will fully accept this as my identity. I went there too late, aged twenty-eight. The simple solution to my problem of identity is to say I am Korean, but there is no such nation. The single Korea does not exist.

I would like to shed my North Korean identity, erase the mark it has made on me. But I can’t. I’m not sure why this is so, but I suspect it is because I had a happy childhood. As children we have a need, as our awareness of the larger world develops, to feel part of something bigger than family, to belong to a nation. The next step is to identify with humanity, as a global citizen. But in me this development got stuck. I grew up knowing almost nothing of the outside world except as it was perceived through the lens of the regime. And when I left, I discovered only gradually that my country is a byword, everywhere, for evil. But I did not know this years ago, when my identity was forming. I thought life in North Korea was normal. Its customs and rulers became strange only with time and distance.

Thus I must say that North Korea is my country. I love it. But I want it to become good. My country is my family and the many good people I knew there. So how could I not be a patriot?

This is my story. I hope that it will allow a glimpse of the world I escaped. I hope it will encourage others like myself, who are struggling to cope with new lives their imaginations never prepared them for. I hope that the world will begin, finally, to listen to them, and to act.

Prologue

I was awoken by my mother’s cry. Min-ho, my kid brother, was still asleep on the floor next to me. The next thing I knew our father came crashing into the room, yelling ‘Wake up!’ He yanked us up by our arms and herded us, pushed us, out of the room. My mother was behind him, shrieking. It was evening and almost dark. The sky was clear. Min-ho was dazed from sleep. Outside on the street we turned and saw oily black smoke pouring from our kitchen window and dark flames licking the outside wall.

To my astonishment, my father was running back into the house.

A strange roar, a wind rushing inward, swept past us. We heard a whumpf. The tiles on one side of the roof collapsed, and a fireball like a bright orange chrysanthemum rose into the sky, illuminating the street. One side of the house was ablaze. Thick, tar-black smoke was belching from the other windows.

Where was my father?

Our neighbours were suddenly all around us. Someone was throwing a bucket of water – as if that would quench this blaze. We heard the groan and splitting of wood and then the rest of the roof went up in flames.

I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t even breathing. My father wasn’t coming out of the house.

It must only have been seconds but it seemed like minutes. He emerged, running toward us, coughing his lungs up. He was blackened by smoke, his face glistening. Under each arm he was holding two flat, rectangular objects.

He wasn’t thinking of our possessions, or our savings. He’d rescued the portraits. I was thirteen, old enough to understand what was at stake.

Later my mother explained what had happened. Some soldiers had given my father a large can of aviation fuel as a bribe. The can was in the kitchen, which was where we had an iron stove that burned yontan – the circular charcoal cakes used for heating everywhere in North Korea. She was in the act of decanting the fuel into another container when it slipped from her hands and splashed onto the coals. The combustion was explosive. The neighbours must have wondered what on earth she’d been cooking.

A wall of intense heat was advancing from the blaze. Min-ho began to wail. I was holding our mother’s hand. My father put the portraits down with great care, then hugged the three of us – a public display of affection that was rare between my parents.

Huddled together, watching the remains of our home collapse in a rippling glow, the neighbours might have felt sorry for us. My father looked a sight – his face was filthy and his new civilian suit ruined. And my mother, who was house-proud and always made an effort to dress nicely, was seeing her best bowls and clothes go up in smoke.

Yet what struck me most was that neither of my parents seemed that upset. Our home was just a low, two-room house with state-issue furniture, common in North Korea. It’s hard to imagine now how anyone would have missed it. But my parents’ reaction made a strong impression on me. The four of us were together and safe – that was all that mattered to them.

This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything – our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.

The whole street had seen my father save the portraits, an act of heroism that would win a citizen an official commendation. As it turned out, matters had gone too far for that. We did not know it, but he was already under surveillance.

PART ONE

Chapter 1
A train through the mountains

One morning in the late summer of 1977, a young woman said goodbye to her sisters on the platform of Hyesan Station and boarded the train for Pyongyang. She had received official permission to visit her brother there. She was so excited she’d slept little the night before. The Capital of the Revolution was, to her mind, a mythic and futuristic place. A trip there was a rare treat.

The air was still cool and smelled of fresh lumber from the nearby mill; the humidity was not yet too high. Her ticket was for a window seat. The train set off, creaking slowly southward along the old Hyesan Line through steep pine-clad mountains and over shaded gorges. Now and then a white-water river could be glimpsed far below. But as the journey progressed she found herself being distracted from the scenery.

The carriage was full of young military officers returning to the capital in high spirits. She thought them annoying at first, but soon caught herself smiling at their banter, along with the other passengers. The officers invited everyone in the carriage to join them in playing games – word games and dice games – to pass the time. When the young woman lost a round, she was told that her forfeit was to sing a song.

The carriage fell quiet. She looked down at the floor, gathered her courage, and stood up, keeping herself steady by holding on to the luggage rack. She was twenty-two years old. Her shiny black hair was pinned back for the journey. She wore a white cotton frock printed with small red flowers. The song she sang was from a popular North Korean movie of that year called The Story of a General. She sang it well, with sweet, high notes. When she finished, everyone in the carriage broke into a round of applause.

She sat back down. A grandmother was sitting on the outside seat and her granddaughter sat between them. Suddenly a young officer in a grey-blue uniform was standing over them. He introduced himself with great courtesy to the grandmother. Then he picked up the little girl, took the seat next to the young woman, and sat the little girl on his lap.

‘Tell me your name,’ was the first thing he said.

This was how my mother met my father.

He sounded very sure of himself. And he spoke with a Pyongyang lilt that made my mother feel uncouth and coarse with her northern Hyesan accent. But he soon put her at her ease. He was from Hyesan himself, he said, but had spent many years in Pyongyang and was ashamed to admit to her that he had lost his accent. She kept her eyes lowered but would steal quick glances at him. He wasn’t handsome in the conventional way – he had thick eyebrows and strong, prominent cheekbones – but she was rather taken with his martial bearing and his self-assurance.

He said he thought her frock was pretty and she gave a shy smile. She liked to dress well because she thought this made up for plain and ordinary looks. In fact she was prettier than she knew. The long journey passed quickly. As they talked she noticed him repeatedly look at her with an earnestness she had not experienced before from a man. It made her face feel hot and flushed.

He asked her how old she was. Then he said, very formally: ‘Would it be acceptable to you if I were to write you a letter?’

She said that it would, and gave him her address.

Later my mother was to recall little of the visit to her brother in Pyongyang. Her mind was filled with images of the officer on the train, and the dappled light in the carriage, of sun shining through mountain pines.

No letter came. As the weeks went by my mother tried to put him out of her mind. He had a girlfriend in Pyongyang, she thought. After three months she’d got over the disappointment and had given up thinking about him.

On an evening six months later, the family was at home in Hyesan. It was well below freezing but the skies had been clear for weeks, making a beautiful autumn and winter. They were finishing dinner when they heard the clip of steel-capped boots approaching the house, and a firm knock on the door. A look of alarm passed around the table. They were not expecting anyone so late. One of my mother’s sisters went to open the door. She called back to my mother.

‘A visitor. For you.’

The power in the city had gone off. My mother went to the door holding a candle. My father was standing on the doorstep, in a military greatcoat, with his cap tucked under his arm. He was shivering. He bowed to her, and apologized, saying that he had been away on military exercises and had not been permitted to write. His smile was tender and even a little nervous. Behind him the stars reached down to the mountains.

She invited him into the warmth. They began courting from that evening.

The next twelve months were dreamlike for my mother. She had never been in love before. My father was still based near Pyongyang, so they wrote letters to each other every week and arranged meetings. My mother visited his military base, and he took the train to see her in Hyesan, where her family got to know him. For her, the weeks between their encounters were filled with the sweetest planning and daydreaming.

She told me once that everything during that time acquired a kind of lustre and magic. People around her seemed to share her optimism, and she may not have been imagining it. The world was at the height of the Cold War, but North Korea was enjoying its best years. Bumper harvests several years in a row meant that food was plentiful. The country’s industries were modern by the standards of the communist world. South Korea, our mortal enemy, was in political chaos, and the hated Yankees had just lost a bruising war against communist forces in Vietnam. The capitalist world seemed to be in decline. There was a confidence throughout the country that history was on our side.

When spring came and the snow on the mountains began to recede my father made a trip to Hyesan to ask my mother to marry him. She accepted with tears. Her happiness was complete. And to cap it all, both his family and hers had good songbun, which made their position in society secure.

Songbun is a caste system that operates in North Korea. A family is classified as loyal, wavering or hostile, depending on what the father’s family was doing at the time just before, during and after the founding of the state in 1948. If your grandfather was descended from workers and peasants, and fought on the right side in the Korean War, your family would be classified as loyal. If, however, your ancestors included landlords, or officials who worked for the Japanese during the colonial occupation, or anyone who had fled to South Korea during the Korean War, your family would be categorized as hostile. Within the three broad categories there are fifty-one gradations of status, ranging from the ruling Kim family at the top, to political prisoners with no hope of release at the bottom. The irony was that the new communist state had created a social hierarchy more elaborate and stratified than anything seen in the time of the feudal emperors. People in the hostile class, which made up about 40 per cent of the population, learned not to dream. They got assigned to farms and mines and manual labour. People in the wavering class might become minor officials, teachers, or hold military ranks removed from the centres of power. Only the loyal class got to live in Pyongyang, had the opportunity to join the Workers’ Party, and had freedom to choose a career. No one was ever told their precise ranking in the songbun system, and yet I think most people knew by intuition, in the same way that in a flock of fifty-one sheep every individual will know precisely which sheep ranks above it and below it in the pecking order. The insidious beauty of it was that it was very easy to sink, but almost impossible to rise in the system, even through marriage, except by some special indulgence of the Great Leader himself. The elite, about 10 or 15 per cent of the population, had to be careful never to make mistakes.

At the time my parents met, a family’s songbun was of great importance. It determined a person’s life, and the lives of their children.

My mother’s family possessed exceptionally good songbun. My grandfather was distinguished for his deeds during the Second World War, becoming a hero for infiltrating the Japanese imperial police when Korea was a Japanese colony, passing intelligence to the local communist partisans in the mountains, and freeing some of them from police cells. After the war he was decorated and widely admired in his community. He kept an old photograph of himself wearing the Japanese police uniform and had written a manuscript telling his story, but after he died my grandmother burned it all in case the story should one day be misunderstood and bring disaster upon the family.

My grandmother had become an ardent communist when she was a college student. She had studied in Japan in the 1940s, and had returned to Korea as part of a small intellectual elite, bringing with her educated ways and refinements that were rare among Koreans at that time, when most people did not even finish elementary school. She joined the Party when she was just nineteen. My grandfather, after marrying her, moved to her hometown of Hyesan, instead of taking her to his own province, as was the custom. He became a local government official. In the autumn of 1950, when American troops entered the city in the first year of the Korean War, he fled to the deep mountains to avoid capture. The Americans were conducting house-to-house searches for members of the Party. My grandmother, who at the time was carrying a baby on her back, one of eight she was to have, hid their Party membership cards between bricks inside the chimneystack.

‘If they’d found the cards, the Americans would have shot us,’ she told me.

Her safekeeping of the cards ensured the family’s high songbun. Those who destroyed their cards as the Americans approached were later to fall under suspicion. Some were purged violently and sent to the gulag. For the rest of her life, my grandmother wore her Party card on a string around her neck, concealed beneath her clothing.

After their twelve months of courtship my parents should have been married. But that was not how events turned out.

The problem was my mother’s mother. My grandmother refused to give permission for the marriage. She was unimpressed with my father’s prospects and his career in the air force. She thought my mother could do better, and marry a man who could provide her with a more comfortable life. For all her education in Japan and her progressive communist credentials, my grandmother belonged to a generation that saw love as a secondary matter when it came to a suitable match. Financial security came first. With luck, the couple could fall in love after the marriage. She saw it as her duty to find my mother the best candidate. In this, my mother could not go against her will. It was unthinkable to defy one’s parent.

My mother’s blissful year began to turn into a nightmare.

Through connections my grandmother had met a glamorous woman who had a career as an actress in Pyongyang’s booming film industry. The woman’s brother was an official at the National Trading Company in the capital, and it was arranged for my mother to be introduced to him. My mother could not believe what was happening to her. She had no interest in this official, pleasant though he was. She was in love with my father. Before she knew it a marriage was being arranged for her.

My mother suffered an emotional breakdown, and for weeks her eyes were sore from crying and lack of sleep. Her pain took her to the edge of despair. She was made to break off relations with my father. When she wrote to tell him the news, he said little in return. She knew she had broken his heart.

My mother married the official from Pyongyang on a bright cold day in spring 1979. It was a traditional wedding. She wore an elaborately embroidered red silk chima jeogori, the national Korean dress – a long skirt wrapped high on the body, and a short jacket over it. Her groom wore a formal, Western-style suit. Afterwards, wedding photographs were taken, as was customary, at the feet of the great bronze statue of Kim Il-sung on Mansu Hill. This was to demonstrate that however much a couple might love each other their love for the Fatherly Leader was greater. No one smiled.

I was conceived during the honeymoon, and born in Hyesan in January 1980. My birth name was Kim Ji-hae.

It would seem that my mother’s future, and mine, was sealed.

Love, however, was setting a course of its own, cutting through my grandmother’s best-laid plans, like water finding its way to the sea.

My mother was born and brought up in Hyesan, the capital of Ryanggang Province in the northeast of the country – a mountainous region of spruce, larch and pine. There is little arable land there, and life can be rugged. In Korean folklore, the character of Hyesan people is tenacious and stubborn. They are survivors. A proverb has it that if you drop them in the middle of the ocean, they will find their way to land. Like all such sayings they are simplifications, and yet I recognized these traits strongly in my mother. In time, Min-ho and I would display similar characteristics – especially the stubbornness.

My mother could not live with the official, my biological father, and left him just after I was born. In the Korean way of measuring age, a child is one year old at the beginning of its first year and not, as in most countries, at the end of the first year. I was age one.

A divorce came soon after. Now it was my grandmother’s turn to suffer sleepless nights. A divorced daughter was shameful enough, but a divorced daughter with a baby on her back would make her chances of making a successful match with someone else almost impossible. My grandmother insisted that I be given up for adoption.

One of my mother’s brothers succeeded in finding a young highborn couple in Pyongyang who were seeking to adopt. The couple made the long journey to Hyesan to meet me and to take me back with them. They brought with them a box of toys and good-quality clothes.

There followed a terrible scene at the house. My mother tearfully refused to give me up. She would not let my grandmother wrest me out of her arms. I began to wail loudly. The couple from Pyongyang watched aghast as my grandmother vented her fury at my mother, then began to panic and implore her. Soon the couple became angry themselves and accused my family of misleading them.

Not long after this, my mother travelled to the military base of my father the officer. In an emotional reunion he accepted her straight away. Without even hesitating he also accepted me as his daughter.

They were so much in love that my grandmother conceded defeat, and she changed her mind about my father from then on. He had an air of authority that struck everyone who met him, yet he was gentle and kind. He never touched alcohol, or lost his temper. The strength of my parents’ feelings for each other, however, was a worry to my grandmother. She warned them that if a couple loved each other too much it would condense all the affection that should last a lifetime into too short a period, and one of them would die young.

My mother and father were finally to marry. But now they had a new problem – this time, his parents. They would strongly have disapproved of the match if they’d known that my mother already had a child by another man, so my parents attempted to keep my existence a secret. In a city like Hyesan, however, where so many people knew each other, such a secret was not easily kept. Word got out, and just a few days before my parents’ wedding my grandparents learned the truth about my existence. They withdrew their permission for my father to marry my mother. My father implored them with passion. He could not bear it if his marriage to my mother were thwarted a second time.

With great reluctance, therefore, my grandparents gave their consent, but on one condition: that my name be changed altogether to symbolize my joining a new family. In North Korea, as elsewhere, it was common for a child’s surname to change if a mother remarried, but it was highly unusual for the first name to change, too. My mother was given no choice in the matter. And so, I was four years old when my identity was changed the second time, just after my parents married. My new name was Park Min-young.

The wedding was a quiet affair in Hyesan. This time there was no elaborate chima jeogori. My mother wore a smart dress suit. My father wore his uniform. His parents made little effort to hide their disapproving faces from my mother’s family.

I was too young to be aware of these tensions. Nor was I aware of the truth of my own parentage. I would not discover the secret until several years later, when I was at elementary school. There is a part of me that still wishes I had never found out. In time, the discovery would have heartbreaking consequences for me, and for the kind and loving man I’d known until then as my father.

Chapter 2
The city at the edge of the world

For the first four years of my life, I grew up among a large extended family of uncles and aunts in Ryanggang Province. Despite the nomadic life that was to come after my parents married, moving with my father’s career to various cities and military bases around the country, these early years formed the deep emotional attachment to Hyesan that has remained with me all my life.

Ryanggang Province is the highest part of Korea. The mountains in summer are spectacular. Winters are snowy and extremely cold. During the colonial period (1910–45), the Japanese brought the railroad and the lumber mills. On some days the air everywhere smelled of fresh-cut pine. The province is home both to the sacred revolutionary sites surrounding Mount Paektu, North Korea’s highest peak, and, conversely, to the hardscrabble penal region of Baekam County, where families that have fallen foul of the regime are sent into internal exile.

When I was growing up Hyesan was an exciting place to be. Not because it was lively – nowhere in the country was noted for its theatre scene, restaurants or fashionable subcultures. The city’s appeal lay in its proximity to the narrow Yalu River, Korea’s ancient border with China. In a closed country like North Korea, Hyesan seemed like a city at the edge of the world. To the citizens who lived there it was a portal through which all manner of marvellous foreign-made goods – legal, illegal and highly illegal – entered the country. This made it a thriving hub of trade and smuggling, which brought many benefits and advantages to the locals, not least of which were opportunities to form lucrative partnerships with Chinese merchants on the other side of the river, and make hard currency. At times it could seem like a semi-lawless place where the government’s iron rule was not so strong. This was because almost everyone, from the municipal Party chief to the lowliest border guard, wanted a share of the riches. Occasionally, however, there were crackdowns ordered by Pyongyang, and they could be brutal.

People from Hyesan were therefore more business-minded and often better off than people elsewhere in North Korea. The grown-ups would tell me that we were fortunate to live there. It was the best place in the whole country after Pyongyang, they said.

My earliest memory is from Hyesan, and it was very nearly my last.

Strangely, I remember the dress I was wearing. It was pretty and pale blue. I had wandered alone down the grassy bank behind our house and was sitting on a wooden sleeper, gathering stones into my lap. The dress and my hands became filthy. Suddenly there was a noise so loud it split the air and echoed off the mountains. I turned and saw a vast, blackened mass the size of a building coming around a curve in the track between the pine trees. It was heading straight at me. I didn’t know what it was.

I have a series of confused images – blazing headlights, screeching metal, a sharp, burning smell. Voices shouting. The horns blasting again.

The black mass was in front of me, over me. I was underneath it. The noise and burning smell were tremendous.

The train driver later told my mother that he’d spotted me on the curve, about a hundred yards up the track, too short a distance to brake and avoid hitting me. His heart nearly stopped, he said. I crawled out from under the fourth carriage. For some reason, I was laughing. There were now many people on the bank. My mother was among them.

She picked me up by my arms and yelled: ‘How many times have I said it, Min-young? Never – go – down – there!’ Then she clutched me to her waist and began weeping uncontrollably. A woman in the crowd came over and told her that this was a good omen. To survive such a disaster so young meant that I would have a long life. For all her common sense, my mother was a superstitious person. Over the years she would repeat this woman’s saying. It became a kind of deliverance myth, and I would remember it in moments of danger.

My mother was one of eight siblings – four sisters and four brothers – all of whom possessed the characteristic Hyesan stubbornness. They were to have curiously diverse careers. At one extreme was Uncle Money. He was an executive at a successful trading company in Pyongyang and could obtain luxurious Western goods. We were very proud of him. At the opposite end was Uncle Poor, who had sunk in the songbun system after marrying a girl from a collective farm. He was a talented artist and could have been one of the elite few permitted to paint the Leaders, but instead lived out his days painting the long red propaganda placards that stood in fields, exhorting tired farmworkers to ‘unleash the transformative phase of economic growth!’ and so on. The other brothers were Uncle Cinema, who ran the local movie theatre, and Uncle Opium, a drug dealer. Uncle Opium was quite an influential figure in Hyesan. His high songbun protected him from investigation and the local police welcomed his bribes. He would sit me on his knee and tell me fabulous folktales of the mountains, of animals and mythical beasts. When I remember these stories now, I realize he was probably high.

Family was everything to my mother. Our social life took place within the family and she formed few friends outside. In that way she was like my father. They were both private people. I would never see them hold hands or catch them cuddling in the kitchen. Few North Koreans are romantically demonstrative in that way. And yet their feelings for each other were always clear. Sometimes, at the dinner table, my mother would say to my father: ‘I’m so happy I met you.’ And my father would lean towards me and whisper, loud enough for my mother to hear: ‘You know, if they brought ten truckloads of women for me and asked me to choose someone else, I would reject them all and choose your mother.’

Throughout their marriage they remained smitten. My mother would giggle and say: ‘Your father has the most beautiful ears!’

When my father was away on military business, my mother would take me to stay with my grandmother or with one of my aunts. The eldest sister was Aunt Old, a melancholy and solitary woman, whose tragic marriage I was not to learn about until years later. The youngest was a generous woman known as Aunt Tall. The most beautiful and talented of my mother’s sisters was Aunt Pretty. As a girl, she’d had hopes of becoming an ice-figure skater, but after a slip in which she’d chipped a tooth, my grandmother put paid to her dreams. Aunt Pretty had a real head for business – a talent my mother also possessed – and made a lot of money sending Chinese goods for sale in Pyongyang and Hamhung. She was tough, too, and once underwent an appendectomy by candlelight when the hospital had neither power nor enough anaesthetic.

‘I could hear them cutting me,’ she said.

I was horrified. ‘Didn’t it hurt?’

‘Well, yes, but what can you do?’

My mother was a born entrepreneur. This aspect of her was unusual for a woman of high songbun. Many such women during the 1980s and early 1990s would have regarded making money from trade as immoral and beneath their dignity. But my mother was from Hyesan, and had a nose for a deal. Over the years ahead she would run many small, profitable ventures that would keep the family alive through the worst imaginable times. ‘Trade’ and ‘market’ were still dirty words when I was growing up, but within a few years attitudes would change radically, when it became a matter of survival.

She was strict with me, and I was brought up well. She had high standards for everything. She taught me it was rude to bump into older people, talk too loudly, eat too quickly, and eat with my mouth open. I learned that it was vulgar to sit with my legs apart. I learned to sit on the floor with my legs folded and tucked underneath, Japanese-style, and my posture bolt upright. She taught me to say goodbye to her and my father in the mornings with a full, ninety-degree bow.

When one of my girl friends dropped by once and saw me do this, she said: ‘What d’you do that for?’

The question surprised me. ‘You don’t do it?’

My friend became weak with laughter. I was teased after that with extravagant, mock-formal bows.

In the house my mother hated untidiness and could be obsessively orderly. In public she always looked her best – she never wore old clothes and had an eye for the fashion trends, although she was seldom satisfied with her appearance. In a society where round-faced women with large eyes and almond-shaped lips are considered beautiful, she bemoaned her narrow eyes and angular face, usually in a way that made fun of herself: ‘When I was pregnant I was worried you’d look like me.’ I acquired my liking for fashion from her.

I was expecting to start kindergarten in Hyesan, but it was not to be. One evening in December my father returned home from work grinning broadly. It was snowing hard outside and his cap and uniform were powdered white. He clapped his hands together, asked for some hot tea, and told us he had received a promotion. He was being transferred. We were moving to Anju, a city near North Korea’s west coast.

Chapter 3
The eyes on the wall

At the beginning of 1984, the three of us arrived in Anju. I was five years old. My mother’s heart sank when she saw the place. The region’s main industry is coal mining, and the Chongchon River, which runs through the city centre to the Yellow Sea, was black with silt and coal slag. We were informed that it smelled badly in summer and was prone to flooding the city in the rainy season. As with other cities in North Korea, much of Anju was rebuilt after the Korean War. All share a similarly drab, colourless look. Concrete blocks of flats lined the main roads in the centre. There were a few Soviet-style state buildings and a public park with the obligatory bronze statue of Kim Il-sung. Squat, tiled-roof houses made up the rest of the city. Hyesan, it has to be said, was not much different, but the mountain backdrop and our colourful family life there made it a magical place to us.

My mother had severe regrets about leaving Hyesan, knowing that she would not be able to visit her mother and siblings easily or often, but at the same time she knew that we were leading a privileged life. Most North Korean families never got to go anywhere. They stayed in the same place all their lives and needed a travel permit even to leave their local county. My father’s job gave him access to goods most other people didn’t have. We ate fish or meat with most meals. I did not know then that many North Koreans ate fish or meat so seldom that they could often remember the dates on which they did so – usually the birthdays of the Leaders, when extra rations were distributed.

We did not like our new house, which was on my father’s military base. It had a wall-mounted radio with a speaker. It could not be turned off, and had no volume control, and would occasionally blast instructions and air-raid drill announcements from the banjang – the head of our neighbourhood people’s unit. The banjang was usually a woman in her fifties whose job it was to deliver warnings from the government, check that no one was staying overnight without a permit, and to keep an eye on the families in her block. The day we moved in she presented us with the two portraits for our home. These were identical to the portraits in our house in Hyesan, and we hung them on the wall before we’d even eaten our first meal there.

Our entire family life, eating, socializing and sleeping, took place beneath the portraits. I was growing up under their gaze. Looking after them was the first rule of every family. In fact they represented a second family, wiser and more benign even than our own parents. They depicted our Great Leader Kim Il-sung, who founded our country, and his beloved son Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader, who would one day succeed him. Their distant, airbrushed faces took pride of place in our home, and in all homes. They hung like icons in every building I ever entered.

From an early age I helped my mother clean them. We used a special cloth provided by the government, which could not be used for cleaning anything else. Even as a toddler I knew that the portraits were not like other household items. Once, when I pointed a finger at them, my mother scolded me loudly. ‘Never do that.’ Pointing, I learned, was extremely rude. If we needed to gesture towards them, we did so with the palm of the hand facing upward, with respect. ‘Like this,’ she said, showing me.

They had to be the highest objects in the room and perfectly aligned. No other pictures or clutter were permitted on the same wall. Public buildings, and the homes of high-ranking cadres of the Party, were obliged to display a third portrait – of Kim Jong-suk, a heroine of the anti-Japanese resistance who died young. She was the first wife of Kim Il-sung and the sainted mother of Kim Jong-il. I thought she was very beautiful. This holy trinity we called the Three Generals of Mount Paektu.

About once a month officials wearing white gloves entered every house in the block to inspect the portraits. If they reported a household for failing to clean them – we once saw them shine a flashlight at an angle to see if they could discern a single mote of dust on the glass – the family would be punished.

Every time we took them down for cleaning we handled them with extreme caution, as if they were priceless treasures from Koryo tombs, or pieces of enriched uranium. Damage to them due to humidity, which could make spots of mould appear on the paper in summer, was acceptable. Damage from any other cause could get a homeowner into serious trouble. Each year, stories of portrait-saving heroics would be featured in the media. My parents would hear a radio report commending a grandfather who’d waded through treacherous flood water holding the portraits above his head (he’d saved them, but sacrificed his own life in the attempt), or see a photograph in the Rodong Sinmun, the national daily, of a couple sitting precariously on the tiled roof of their hut after a catastrophic mudslide, clutching the sacred portraits. The newspaper exhorted all citizens to emulate the example of these real-life heroes.

This intrusion of the state into our home did not seem oppressive or unnatural to me. It was unthinkable that anyone would complain about the portraits. On the biggest dates in the calendar – the birthdays of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il – the three of us would line up in front of them and make a solemn bow.

That small family ceremony was the only time politics entered our house. When my father came home from work, and the table was laid with rice, soup, kimchi and pickles, which we ate with every meal, my mother waited for me to say: ‘Thank you, Respected Father Leader Kim Il-sung, for our food’ before we picked up our chopsticks. But over dinner my parents chatted only of personal matters, or family. There was usually plenty of innocuous family news from Hyesan to talk about.

Serious topics were never discussed. I learned to avoid them in the way children acquire a sense for the dangers of the road. This was for my own protection, and we were no different from other families in that respect. Since there was no aspect of life, public or private, that fell outside the authority of the Party, almost every topic of conversation was potentially political, and potentially dangerous. My parents would not risk an incautious remark that might be repeated innocently by me, or misunderstood.

Growing up, I sensed this danger. I knew it was out there, but at the same time it was normal, like air pollution, or the potential for fire to burn. I didn’t worry about it, and neither did Min-ho, when he came along. We seldom even mentioned the Leaders whose eyes shone upon us from the wall. Saying Kim Il-sung’s name, for example, and forgetting to affix one of his titles – Great Leader, Respected Father Leader, Comrade, President or Marshal – could result in serious punishment if anyone reported the offence.

I played and quarrelled with other children, just like children anywhere else in the world. My parents did the worrying for me. My mother, in particular, seemed to have a talent for warding off trouble. Part of this came from the self-confidence of being a woman of high songbun. But she also possessed a natural tact in dealing with people, which would save us from disaster several times. She was good at managing the banjang, and would go out of her way to befriend her at the weekly block meetings, and give her small gifts. Most of the banjang women we knew were tough, reasonable types my mother could relate to. But she was always careful about what was on view in our house so as not to draw the state’s attention or cause envy.

If my mother couldn’t solve a problem with reason and good will, she’d try to solve it with money.

The week after we arrived in Anju she was stopped in a city-centre street by five volunteers wearing red armbands. These vigilantes would prowl the city looking for violators of North Korea’s myriad social laws – anyone in jeans, men whose hair was a touch too long, women wearing a necklace or a foreign perfume – all of which were unsocialist and symbolic of moral degeneracy and capitalist decadence. The volunteers could be aggressive and arrogant in their zeal. Their nastiest trick was to catch people during the morning rush hour who had left home forgetting to wear their pin of the Great Leader’s face, a small round badge worn by all adult North Koreans over their hearts. Those caught could find themselves with a delicate problem. No one could say they had ‘simply forgotten’ the Great Leader.

My mother’s crime that morning was that she happened to be wearing trousers in public, not a skirt. This was prohibited, since the leadership had decreed that trousers were unbecoming of the Korean woman. The volunteers surrounded her and demanded to know why she was wearing them. To avoid a scene, she paid the fine, then slipped them a bribe so that the offence would not be entered in her ID passbook.

My mother bribed people confidently. There was nothing unusual in this, as long as you weren’t caught. In North Korea, bribery is often the only way of making anything happen, or of circumventing a harsh law, or a piece of nonsense ideology.

Gradually we got used to life on the military base. Military life, I found, was not so different from civilian life. Everyone knew each other, and there was little security. My father joked that the whole country was a military base. None of us made friends easily at that time.

Like my father, my mother avoided being sociable. She knew how to keep her distance from people. This reserve served her well in a country where the more people you knew the more likely you were to be criticized or denounced. If I brought a friend home to the house, she would be hospitable rather than welcoming. But this was not really the person she was. One of the tragedies of North Korea is that everyone wears a mask, which they let slip at their peril. The mask my mother presented to people outside the family was of a hardened, no-nonsense woman of high songbun. In truth, it hid a sense of fun and a deep compassion for others. She would risk everything for those she loved. She regularly helped out siblings who were not so well off, especially Uncle Poor and his family on the collective farm, with food, clothes and money – so much so that I am ashamed to say that I resented it and complained. And for all her practicality she had a spiritual nature. She felt strongly in touch with her ancestors and would honour them with food and offerings at their gravesides at the lunar New Year and at Chuseok, the autumn harvest festival. At such times she would speak in a hushed voice and tell me: ‘Careful what you say.’ The ancestors were listening.

My closest friend at this time was my tiny pet dog – it was one of the cute little breeds that people in other countries put frocks on. I wouldn’t have been allowed to do that, because putting clothes on dogs was a well-known example of capitalist degeneracy. The Yankee jackals care more about dogs than people. This is what the teachers in my kindergarten told me. They even dress them up in clothes. That’s because they are like dogs themselves.

I was six when I entered kindergarten in Anju. And although I was far too young to notice it, this marked a subtle change in my relationship with my parents. In a sense, I no longer belonged to them. I belonged to the state.

Chapter 4
The lady in black

The school year started in September, with a long vacation in the winter, not the summer, due to the difficulty of keeping the schools warm in North Korea’s harsh winters. My kindergarten had a large wood-burning stove in the middle of the classroom and walls painted with colourful scenes of children performing gymnastics, children in uniform, and of a North Korean soldier simultaneously impaling a Yankee, a Japanese and a South Korean soldier with his rifle bayonet.

Ideological indoctrination began on the first day.

The teachers read us stories of child heroes who’d fought the Japanese during the period of colonial rule in Korea, and legends from the boyhood of Kim Il-sung – of how he’d suffered for the people’s happiness even as an infant, giving away his own food and shoes to children less fortunate.

Whenever the Leaders were mentioned, the teachers adopted low, tremulous voices, as if they were intoning the names of living gods. The walls displayed photographs of Kim Il-sung as a young guerrilla; Kim Il-sung surrounded by smiling orphans; Kim Il-sung in his white marshal’s uniform, as the father of our nation. He was tall and striking, and his brave wife, Kim Jong-suk, who had fought alongside him, seemed like a lady from a folktale. It was not difficult to adore them.

The story of the nativity of their son, the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, brought me out in goose bumps. His birth was foretold by miraculous signs in the heavens – a double rainbow over Mount Paektu, swallows singing songs of praise with human voices, and the appearance of a bright new star in the sky. We listened to this and a shudder of awe passed through our small bodies. My scalp tingled. This was pure magic. The teachers encouraged us to draw and paint the snow-covered wooden cabin of his birth, with the sacred mountain behind it, and the new star in the sky. His birthday, on 16 February, was the Day of the Bright Star. The kindergarten also had a little model of the cabin, with painted-on snow, beneath a glass case.

This was a very happy time for me. We were the children of Kim Il-sung, and that made us children of the greatest nation on earth. We sang songs about the village of his birth, Mangyongdae, performing a little dance and putting our hands in the air on the word ‘Mangyongdae’. His birthday, on 15 April, was the Day of the Sun, and our country was the Land of the Eternal Sun.

These birthdays were national holidays and all children were given treats and candies. From our youngest years we associated the Great Leader and Dear Leader with gifts and excitement in the way that children in the West think of Santa Claus.

I was too young not to believe every word. I believed absolutely that this heroic family had saved our homeland. Kim Il-sung created everything in our country. Nothing existed before him. He was our father’s father and our mother’s father. He was an invincible warrior who had defeated two great imperial powers in one lifetime – something that had never happened before in five thousand years of our history. He fought 100,000 battles against the Japanese in ten years – and that was before he’d even defeated the Yankees. He could travel for days without resting. He could appear simultaneously in the east and in the west. In his presence flowers bloomed and snow melted.

Even the toys we played with were used for our ideological education. If I built a train out of building blocks, the teacher would tell me that I could drive it to South Korea to save the starving children there. My mission was to bring them home to the bosom of Respected Father Leader.

Many of the songs we sang in class were about unifying Korea. This was a matter close to my heart because, we were told, South Korean children were dressed in rags. They scavenged for food on garbage heaps and suffered the sadistic cruelty of American soldiers, who used them for target practice, ran them over in jeeps, or made them polish boots. Our teacher showed us cartoon drawings of children begging barefoot in winter. I felt desperately sorry for them. I really wished I could rescue them.

The teachers were nice to us, in accordance with the Great Leader’s oft-repeated view that children are the future and should be treated like royalty. There was no corporal punishment in schools. We sang a song called ‘We Are Happy’ and meant every word of it. We felt loved, confident and grateful.

My parents never dared criticize our schooling in front of me, or later, in front of Min-ho. That would have been dangerous. But neither did they comment on it, or reinforce what we learned. In fact they never mentioned it. My mother did, however, teach me to praise the Great Leader and the nation for anything good that came our way. This came from her acute sense of caution. Not to do so would have reflected on her, and might have been noticed by an informer. And there were informers everywhere – on the military base where we lived, in the city streets, in my kindergarten. They reported to the provincial bureau of the Ministry of State Security, the Bowibu. This was the secret police. The translation doesn’t convey the power the word Bowibu has to send a chill through a North Korean. Its very mention, as the poet Jang Jin-sung put it, was enough to silence a crying child.

The Bowibu didn’t watch from street corners or parked cars, or eavesdrop on conversations through walls. They didn’t need to. The citizenry did all that for them. Neighbours could be relied upon to inform on neighbours; children to spy on children; workers to watch co-workers; and the head of the neighbourhood people’s unit, the banjang, maintained an organized system of surveillance on every family in her unit. If the authorities asked her to place a particular family under closer watch, she would make the family’s neighbours complicit. Informers often received extra food rations for their work. The Bowibu weren’t interested in the real crimes that affected people, such as theft, which was rife, or corruption, but only in political disloyalty, the faintest hint of which, real or imagined, was enough to make an entire family – grandparents, parents and children – disappear. Their house would be roped off; they’d be taken away in a truck at night, and not seen again.

I never noticed my parents’ silence on the subjects we were taught. This would only take on significance for me years later. Neither did I ever question their loyalty or doubt that they believed the selfless and superhuman feats of Kim Il-sung in saving our nation.

During a summer vacation from kindergarten, my mother took me on a visit to our family in Hyesan. That trip is memorable because I heard another myth that was to shape my childish idea of the world. It was told to me by Uncle Opium, the drug dealer, at the house of my grandmother.

Opium wasn’t hard to come by in North Korea. Farmers had been cultivating poppies since the 1970s, with state laboratories refining the raw produce into high-quality heroin – one of the few products the country made to an international standard. It was sold abroad to raise foreign currency. North Koreans, however, were forbidden to use it or trade with it. But in such a bribe-dependent economy, plenty of it found its way into the general population. My uncle was selling it illegally in Hyesan and over the river in China, where there was a strong demand. My grandmother used it regularly. Many people did – painkillers and pharmaceutical medicines were often hard to come by.

Uncle Opium had enormous shining eyes, much larger than any of my mother’s other siblings. It was years before the penny dropped and I realized why his eyes looked like this. He told me a lady came down from the sky every time it rained.

‘She is dressed in black,’ he said mysteriously, sucking on a cigarette of rough tobacco and blowing a ring of yellow smoke. ‘If you grab hold of her skirts she’ll take you up there with her.’

Back in Anju I waited days for it to rain. When finally I heard thunder I ran out of the house and looked up at the clouds. The raindrops splashed on my face. If the Respected Father Leader Kim Il-sung could appear in the east and in the west at the same time, it seemed quite reasonable to me that there would be a lady in black who flew among the clouds. I began to picture her realm up there in the sky. The thought of this lady scared the wits out of me, but I was too curious not to look for her. I held on to the steps in case she came down as fast as the rain and snatched me.

My mother quickly ruined the magic.

‘What are you doing?’ she yelled from the front door. ‘Get in here.’

‘I’m waiting for the lady in black.’

‘What?’

Then her expression changed, as if she were remembering something. She clearly had some recollection of this story from Uncle Opium, and then realized I’d completely fallen for it. Suddenly she was laughing so hard she was bent over with her arms wrapped around herself. Then she hugged me and I could feel her body shaking. She was still laughing hours later when my father came home and she was cooking the rice for dinner, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve.

Now I was confused.

Some magical stories I was supposed to believe in with all my heart and could never doubt. Others I believed in at a cost to my dignity. I had really wanted to believe in the lady in black.

The world inside the kindergarten was clear. The teachers had simple answers for everything good and everything bad. Outside the kindergarten, the world was more confusing. Uncle Opium could probably have explained it to me, if I’d ever been able to have a normal conversation with him.

At his house once I saw a solid gold bar on the table, and next to it a gluey lump that looked like tar. I asked him what it was and he told me it was opium.

‘Stick the end of your pencil in and take a bit,’ he said.

‘What do I do with it?’

He gave a breathy, hissing laugh. ‘Eat it, of course.’

I had a cold at the time and wasn’t feeling too good. The symptoms disappeared within minutes.

Anju may have been grimy and bleak but the hills surrounding it were beautiful. I enjoyed three idyllic childhood summers there, picnicking in fields of wild flowers. In certain months of the year the air would be buzzing with dragonflies. They hovered and flashed in iridescent blues and greens. We would chase them, running through the long grass. All the kids did this. At the weekend, my father would join in. Some kids bit off the heads and ate them, saying they tasted nutty.

On one outing we laid out our picnic mat in a copse of tall pine trees. My mother started hitting the trees with a long branch and suddenly it was raining pine cones. I ran around gathering them in a sack. We had never laughed so much together.

That scene is vivid in my mind as a moment of pure happiness just before a painful personal tragedy for me. We arrived home to find that my little dog had been killed. One of the trucks at the military base had run her over. I cried so much. My father told me there would not be another pet dog. They were too hard to obtain.

But it wasn’t that event that overshadowed my memories of Anju. There was far worse to come.

Chapter 5
The man beneath the bridge

On a hot afternoon when I was seven years old, my mother sent me on some errand into town. It was unpleasantly humid. A fetid smell came off the river. There were flies everywhere. I was heading home along the riverbank when I saw the crowd ahead of me. A dense mass of people had gathered on the road beneath the railroad bridge. I had an odd intuition that this was something bad, but I could not resist going to look. I slipped my way into the crowd to see what was going on. The people near the front were looking upward. I followed their gaze, and saw a man hanging by his neck.

His face was covered with a dirty cloth sack and his hands were tied behind his back. He was wearing the indigo uniform of a factory worker. He wasn’t moving but his body swayed slightly on a rope tied from the iron railing of the bridge. Several soldiers were standing about, stony-faced, with rifles on their backs. The people watching were still and quiet, as if this were some sort of ceremony. The rope creaked. I caught a reek of male sweat. The scene confused me because people were watching but no one was moving and no one was helping the man.

The most random detail stuck in my mind. I remember how the man standing next to me lit a cigarette and held it down by his side so that the smoke gathered foggily in his fingers. There was no breeze. Suddenly it seemed like there was no air to breathe.

I had to get out of there. I almost fought my way out.

When I told my mother what I’d seen she went as pale as a fish. She turned her back to me and pretended to busy herself with something. Then she muttered: ‘Don’t ever watch those things.’

Over the next few days there was a spate of hangings across the city, and my mother became unnerved. One of the victims was someone she knew – a woman named Baek Kyeong-sul. She was accused of seducing a state bank official in order to steal money, and was sentenced at a people’s trial. My mother was there. These were not actually trials at all – the charges were simply read out and the victim executed on the spot. If the accused were to pass out from terror beforehand, the authorities were meant to adjourn to another day, so the victim was kept from knowing what was happening until the last moment.

It was near the start of the rainy season and the skies over Anju had been rumbling with thunder all morning, which further set my mother’s nerves on edge. She was pregnant with Min-ho, and not feeling herself.

The woman emerged from the back of a police van and found herself facing eight judges seated behind a table set up in a public square, which was surrounded by a cordon of police and a large silent crowd. Her hands were bound behind her back and her face so blackened and puffy from beatings that my mother hardly recognized her. She was disorientated and stared about with an animal terror in her eyes.

In a hail of static, the charges were read out through a loudspeaker.

The woman fell to her knees and began to whimper, saying she was deeply sorry and ashamed for what she had done. My mother knew that the woman had a son who was a police officer; the woman must have believed that her son’s connections would save her.

‘The sentence is death by hanging.’

The woman’s head jerked upward in shock. She looked around at the crowd as if appealing to them. Behind the police vans was a tall wooden pole with a noose hanging from it that had been kept hidden from her view. Police grabbed her at once and frogmarched her to the pole. She struggled and kicked out and wailed, but the noose was over her head in an instant. The rope was yanked taut, lifting her up into the air. She writhed and twitched for a few seconds before going limp.

When my mother returned home, the rain was coming down in lead rods. She had an odd, vacant stare in her eyes. She said she hadn’t realized until then that it was as easy to kill a person as to kill an animal. The corpse had been thrown roughly onto the back of a truck. She’d asked one of the court officials where it was to be buried, and was told it would be taken to a garbage pit and covered in ash.

That was the detail that unhinged my mother.

Without an ancestral grave for her descendants to honour, the woman’s spirit would find no rest. It would haunt the living.

That summer my father’s work had been taking him to military bases all over the country. Without his reassuring presence, my mother was having problems sleeping after the hangings. At breakfast she’d be hollow-eyed, saying she’d seen the ghosts of the victims in nightmares. She couldn’t concentrate on the simplest task. She was badly spooked and wanted to get out of Anju. I’m not sure whether it was after pressure from her, or simply an extraordinary coincidence, but she was immensely relieved when my father announced that we were relocating – to North Korea’s second-largest city, Hamhung.

We left Anju, but did not go immediately to Hamhung. My parents wanted the new baby to be born in our home city, Hyesan, so that his birth documentation would be registered there, the same as the rest of the family’s. So it was in Hyesan that my little brother was born. North Korean families have a tradition of naming children with the same first syllable, so although I was Min-young, my brother became Min-ho. I was seven years old, and feeling peevish at all the cooing and adoring the new arrival was receiving, and the stream of family visitors – Aunt Old, Aunt Pretty, Aunt Tall, Uncle Opium and Uncle Cinema – coming to see him, with congratulations and armfuls of gifts, but my mother was radiant, and overjoyed to be surrounded by family members and old neighbours once again.

There was one family matter, however, that she was not looking forward to. My father’s parents wanted to meet their new grandson. At this time I still had not learned the truth about my parentage. I thought my father’s parents were my blood grandparents, but for reasons obscure to me we had never got around to meeting them.

Their house had cold wooden floors. I didn’t like being there. Neither, I sensed, did my mother. My grandfather was a forbidding presence who did not invite conversation. At dinner, he sat on the floor away from us, at a separate table. My grandmother served him first. It was a mark of respect, but it seemed to put a distance between everyone. My father, who normally exuded calm and confidence, was decidedly tense and talking too much to fill the silences. There was none of the chatter that surrounded us when we visited my mother’s mother and my uncles and aunts.

I sensed the moment I arrived at their house that these grandparents liked Min-ho much more than me. The only time their faces lit up was when they held him, or when he gurgled and cried. With him they were affectionate. With my mother and me they were cool and civil. I told myself it was because Min-ho was a boy and these formal, old-fashioned people preferred grandsons to granddaughters. He was my parents’ only son, which gave him a position of supreme importance in the family. Over the coming years, each time we visited, they would have gifts for Min-ho, but not for me. I realize now that my mother must have known that this was how it would be. It was why she went out of her way to be generous and bighearted toward me, to give me pocket money and sweets when I asked for them, and nice clothes. It was also the reason she presented me, on my ninth birthday, with the most marvellous gift I ever received in North Korea.

Chapter 6
The red shoes

I was very excited about the move to Hamhung, on the east coast. At that time Hamhung was a major industrial hub, famous as a centre for the production of Vinylon – a synthetic fibre, used in uniforms, that was invented in North Korea. It was an achievement we were so proud of that patriotic songs were sung about it. It held dye badly, shrank easily, was stiff and uncomfortable to wear, but it was marvellously flame-resistant. The city also boasted many restaurants and a grand new theatre – the largest in North Korea.

I couldn’t stop pointing at the numbers of vehicles everywhere; there were far more than in Anju, and more bicycles, too. The streets were broad, grand boulevards with trolley buses that trailed sparks from the overhead cables, and the buildings weren’t so shabby. The air was badly polluted, however. On some mornings the sky had a sulphurous yellow tint and stank of chemicals from the vast Hungnam ammonium fertilizer complex, which the Great Leader himself had visited several times and delivered on-the-spot guidance. His words were everywhere, on red-painted placards throughout the city, carved on stone plaques, and in letters six feet high on the side of Mount Tonghung. His image was omnipresent, in murals of coloured glass, in statues of marble and bronze, in portraits on the sides of buildings, which depicted him as soldier or scientist; as stern ideologue or jovial friend of children.

Despite my father’s high rank in the air force the accommodation was barely adequate. This time our home was on another military base in a six-storey concrete apartment block with no elevator. We had three rooms and cold running water. It was decorated with yellowed wallpaper, which my mother immediately had changed for a better-quality washable type. She had the bathroom walls tiled blue. In winter the pipes froze; in summer mould would turn the outside walls black.

I was very lucky, however, although I still did not fully understand quite how lucky. My father’s rank not only gave him access to goods many people didn’t have, but he received a lot of food and household items as gifts and bribes.

In theory the government provided for everyone’s needs – food, fuel, housing and clothing – through the Public Distribution System. The quality and the amount you received depended on the importance of your work. Twice a month your workplace provided you with ration coupons to exchange for the goods. Until a few years previously, the Party had still seriously been thinking of abolishing money. When the system actually worked, money was only needed as pocket money, or for the beauty parlour. But most of the time, the communist central planning system was so inefficient that it frequently broke down, rations dwindled or disappeared through theft, and people relied more and more on bribery or on unofficial markets for their essentials – for which cash, and often hard foreign currency, not the Korean won, was required.

We ate out quite often at restaurants that served naengmyeon, for which Hamhung is famous. These are noodles served in an ice-cold beef broth with a tangy sauce, although there are many variations. My mother would eat naengmyeon with her eyes closed in pure pleasure. She loved it to the point of addiction.

On Sundays, I played with neighbourhood girl friends outside on the concrete forecourt of our apartment block. We would skip or play a type of hopscotch called sabanchigi.

For the other six days of the week I was either at school or busy with school-related activities. It wasn’t just the children’s time that got filled up. Everyone – factory workers, cadres, soldiers, dock workers, farmers, teachers, housewives, pensioners, and my parents included – was kept constantly busy with some kind of after-hours organizational meeting or mind-numbing activity, such as ideological ‘study groups’ or ‘discussions’, which often involved memorizing the speeches of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, or attending lectures that could last for hours after work, on everything from the revolutionary history of the early Party and new techniques for pig rearing, to hydroelectric power and the poetry of Kim Jong-il. This was part of the communist way – to ensure that no one could ever deviate into a selfish, individualistic or private life – but it was also a system of surveillance. Perpetual communal participation meant that the hours in each day when we were not being watched, by someone, were few.

I had begun elementary school in Anju, but now I had to join a new one in Hamhung, which filled me with apprehension. My mother had real trouble getting me to enter the building on my first day. The children seemed rough, and had a different accent; there was no ‘village’ feel as there had been at the school in Anju. Banners in the school corridors made our priorities clear: ‘Let us study for our country!’ and ‘Always be on the alert for Marshal Kim Il-sung!’

But I was outgoing, and curious about my new classmates. I soon made some good friends among the girls. That came from the confidence a loving family gave me.

It was at school in Hamhung that I received my initiation into ‘life purification time’, or self-criticism sessions. These have been a basic feature of life in North Korea since they were introduced by Kim Jong-il in 1974, and are the occasions almost everyone dreads. They start in elementary school and continue throughout a person’s life. Ours were held every Friday, and involved my entire class of forty students. Our teacher presided. Everyone took turns to stand up, accuse someone, and confess something. No one was excused for shyness. No one was allowed to be blameless.

It must have been humiliating and painful for the adults, standing up to criticize a colleague for some work-related or personal failing in front of the whole workforce. But there was only so much for which young children could be held guilty. The atmosphere in class was deadly serious. The teacher would not tolerate the mildest levity, even though the accusations were often ludicrous. The formula was to open the session with a commandment from Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il and then stand up and accuse the child who had violated it. When the accusations started to fly and fingers started to point, this was the only time, ironically, that we called each other ‘comrade’.

These sessions could create an atmosphere of great fear and bitterness, even among children. But often, through a humanity we all possess, adults and children alike would find ways of taking the poison out of them. If I couldn’t face accusing someone I’d sometimes accuse myself, which was permitted. Or a friend and I would strike a deal where she would criticize me one week, and I would criticize her the following week with some prearranged made-up charge. And so my friend would stand and say: ‘Our Respected Father Leader said that children must focus on their studies with dedication in their hearts and a clear mind.’ Then she’d point at me. ‘In the last week I have noticed that Comrade Park is not listening in class.’ I would hang my head and try to look chastened. The next week would be my turn. That way we stayed friends. My mother would make a similar pact with colleagues at her workplace; so did Min-ho when he got to elementary school. The sessions taught me a survival lesson. I had to be discreet, be cautious about what I said and did, and be very wary of others. Already I was acquiring the mask that the adults wore from long practice.

Often, students would find themselves criticized unexpectedly. When this happened, they took revenge. In rare cases, it could be lethal. On one occasion, in my final year of secondary school, a boy in my class pointed at another boy and said: ‘When I went to your house, I saw that you had many things you didn’t have before. Where did you get the money to pay for them?’ The teacher reported the criticism to the headmaster, who reported it to the Bowibu. They investigated and found that the family had a son who had escaped the country and was sending them money from South Korea. Three generations of the family were arrested as traitors.

Like the ever-present danger of informers, I took the self-criticism sessions to be part of normal life. But I also had the sense there was nothing positive about them; they were entirely negative.

The biggest milestone of my youth came at the age of nine, in Hamhung. With all other children my age, I entered the Young Pioneer Corps, North Korea’s communist youth movement. Ceremonies were held at schools all over the country on the same day, with parents and teachers assembling at large public places for the occasion. This is considered one of the proudest days in a North Korean’s life.

Joining the Pioneers is compulsory between the ages of nine and fourteen, but not everyone is accepted at the same time. First, there is a formidable test of memorizing: I had to show that I’d learned the Young Pioneer’s rights and duties by heart. From now on, I followed the orders of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, no matter where, no matter what. I must think and act in accordance with their teachings. I must reject and denounce anyone who directed me to do anything against their will. I was good at memorizing, and passed the test easily. And as I’d done well in the most important subjects on the school curriculum – the revolutionary history of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il – I was selected for the first induction ceremony of the year, on Kim Jong-il’s birthday, 16 February, in 1989.

A few days before the ceremony my mother bought me a pair of new shoes especially for the occasion. They were foreign-made and from a dollar store – a special shop for people who had access to foreign currency and wanted to spend it. I was so excited about these shoes that, in order to calm me down, she let me take a peek at them. They were patent-leather Mary Janes, fastened with a buckle, and were a luscious deep red – nothing like the cheap state-issue shoes we all wore, and which only came in black. My mother wouldn’t let me take them out of the box until the night before the ceremony.

At the ceremony we were to receive a red cotton scarf and a small silver Pioneer badge to pin on our blouses. To me the scarf was the mark of a grown-up and meant that I was no longer a kid. But this excitement was displaced unexpectedly by my anticipation of the red shoes. The wait was agonizing. The night before the ceremony I slept with them next to me on the bed – I woke a few times to check they were still there.

When the morning came at last I was ecstatic. The event was held in my school hall. The walls were adorned for the occasion with paintings and collages that the children had made – of the secret guerrilla base in the forests of Mount Paektu where the Dear Leader was born, and of the new star that had appeared in the heavens on the night of his birth. Amplified speeches boomed from the headmaster and the teachers on the stage, whose centrepiece was an enormous bouquet of kimjongilia, a fleshy red begonia that is the flower of Kim Jong-il. Everyone then stood to sing the ‘Song of General Kim Jong-il’, and finally the Pioneers stepped up to the stage to receive, with great solemnity, their scarves and badges. The parents in the audience applauded each one.

I walked up to receive mine, bursting with pride for my red shoes. It surprises me now to think that there were no repercussions. All present in the school hall must have noticed them. It did not strike me until years later what an unusual gift they were. Most kids at the ceremony – several hundred of them – were wearing the state-issue black shoes. My mother was a cautious woman, but, consciously or not, she was encouraging a distinct individualism in me.

We took many group photos and family photos. It was a proud day for my parents. My father wore his air force uniform. My mother was carrying Min-ho, aged two.

Classmates not selected for that day’s ceremony had to wait until the next ceremony on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, 15 April.

One girl I was friendly with had not been accepted for the February induction and was often absent from class. For some reason our teacher decided that she and some of the girl’s friends should visit the girl’s home to see if she was all right. It was in a run-down area of the city where hoodlums hung about. The housing was very squalid. Our visit was a terrible mistake. Her house was bare, and smelled of sewage. She had obviously hoped to hide her poverty from us, but there we were, crowded into one of her two small rooms, staring at our feet while our teacher, flushed with embarrassment, suggested to her mother that our friend should try to attend school every day.

The experience was deeply confusing for me. I knew there were degrees of privilege, but we were also equal citizens in the best country in the world. The Leaders were dedicating their lives to providing for all of us. Weren’t they?

Schooling in North Korea is free, though in reality parents are perpetually being given quotas for donations of goods, which the school sells to pay for facilities. My friend had not been attending because her parents could not afford these donations. None of us was cynical enough to realize that our schooling was not really free at all. The donations were a patriotic duty – rabbit-fur for the gloves and hats of the soldiers who kept us safe; scrap iron for their guns, copper for their bullets; mushrooms and berries as foreign currency-earning exports. Sometimes a child would be criticized by the teacher in front of the class for not bringing in the quota.

In early 1990, when I was ten years old, my father announced that we were moving again, this time back to Hyesan. My mother had had enough of the pollution and grind of life in Hamhung, and missed her family and the clean air. She did not think an industrial city was a good place to bring up Min-ho. Once again, we looked forward to the move. My parents talked incessantly of Hyesan and of the people there.

We were going home.

Min-ho, my mother, and I all waved goodbye to my father, and to Hamhung, from the train window. My father would follow in a day or two. That journey home would not have stuck in my mind but for a drama we experienced on the way that made a lasting impression on my mother and me.

On the way north we had to change trains at a town called Kil-ju on the east coast. Train stations in North Korea have a rigorous inspection of travellers’ documents, with passengers often having to pass through cordons of police and ticket inspectors. No one can board a train without a travel permit stamped in their ID passbook, together with a train ticket, which is valid for four days only. The documentation is then checked all over again at the destination station. A woman ticket inspector examined my mother’s ticket and told her brusquely that it had expired. She was the type of official most North Koreans are familiar with – a mini Great Leader when in uniform. She took my mother’s ID passbook and ticket and told her to wait.

My mother’s face fell into her hands. Now we had a problem. She would have to get permission from Hamhung again before we could buy new tickets. That would take time and she had two children in tow, and luggage. We were stranded. Min-ho was crying loudly. My mother took him off her back and held him and together we slumped onto a bench inside the station. I held her hand. We must have looked a desolate bunch, because a middle-aged man in the grey cap and uniform of the Korean State Railway came up to us and smiled. He asked what the matter was. My mother explained, and he went to the ticket inspector’s office. The woman was not there, but he brought back my mother’s ticket and ID passbook, and gave them to her.

In a low voice he said: ‘When the train stops, jump on. But if she comes looking for you, hide.’

My mother was so grateful that she asked for his address so that she could send him something.

He held up his palms. ‘No time for that.’

The train was creaking into the station, bringing with it a reek of latrines and soldered steel. It screeched to a stop and the doors began flying open.

We boarded. The carriage was crowded. My mother quickly explained our predicament to the passengers and asked if we could crouch down behind them. Sure enough, a minute later we heard the voice of the ticket inspector, asking people on the platform about us. Next thing we knew she had entered the carriage.

‘Have you seen a woman with a baby and a little girl?’ She was shouting. ‘Did she get on the train?’

‘Yes.’ Two of the passengers in front of us said this in unison. ‘They went that way.’

The woman got off, still looking left and right for us. We heard her asking more people on the platform. We were holding our breath. Why wasn’t the train moving? A minute seemed to pass. Finally we heard the shrill note of a whistle. The train shunted forward, couplings banging together. My mother looked at me and finally exhaled. She’d been terrified Min-ho would start bawling again.

Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all. The episode was so unusual that my mother was to recall it many times, saying how thankful she was to that man, and to the passengers. A few years later, when the country entered its darkest period, we would remember him. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.

Chapter 7
Boomtown

Our new home in Hyesan was another house allocated to us by the military. Our neighbours were other military officials and their families. The accommodation was good by North Korean standards. It had two rooms and a squat toilet. The heating in the floor was piping hot, making the glue beneath the reja – a kind of linoleum – give off a smell like mushrooms, but the building was poorly insulated. In winter we’d have warm backsides and freezing noses. We had to boil water when we wanted a hot bath.

My mother did her usual makeover, replacing the wallpaper and the furniture. She didn’t mind. She was thrilled to be back in Hyesan and reconnected with our family social circles. We felt settled.

Hyesan had been booming in the years we’d been away. The illicit trade coming over the border from China seemed greater than ever and my mother wanted to get in on some deals. She had found a job with a local government bureau, but her salary, as with all state jobs, was negligible. She wanted to make serious money, like Aunt Pretty, Uncle Money and Uncle Opium.

It seemed that everything was available in Hyesan – from high-value liquor and expensive foreign perfume to Western-brand clothing and Japanese electronics – at a price. Smugglers brought goods from the county of Changbai, on the Chinese side, across the narrow, shallow river for collection by a Korean contact, or across the Changbai–Hyesan International Bridge (known to locals as the Friendship Bridge). Illegal trade across the bridge required bribing the North Korean customs officials; smuggling across the river required bribing the border guards. When the river froze solid in winter smugglers crept over the ice; the rest of the year they waded across at night, or in broad daylight, if the guards at key points had been bribed and were in on the deal.

We could see the prosperity. This would not have been at all obvious to outsiders, since North Koreans are poor and do not wish to draw the state’s attention. Anyone looking across from China would have seen a city in deep blackout at night, with a few kerosene lamps flickering in windows, and a colourless, drab place by day, with people cycling joylessly to work. But the signs were all around us. The special hotel for foreigners, where our parents sometimes took Min-ho and me for an overnight stay as a treat (the manager was a friend of my mother’s), was always full with Chinese business people. In the morning we’d join them for breakfast but never talk to them, in case any informers or Bowibu agents were listening. The city’s dollar store, opposite Hyesan Station, had plenty of customers spending hard currency on goods not obtainable anywhere else, and certainly not through the state’s Public Distribution System. Going there was like being admitted into a magical cavern. I couldn’t believe how brightly the goods were packaged – foreign-made cookies and chocolates in wrappers of silver and purple that made them irresistibly tempting, and fruit juices – orange, apple, grape – in clear bottles marked with Western letters, that came from some faraway land of plenty. Outside the store, a few illegal moneychangers hung about like flies. My mother walked straight past them and would have nothing to do with them, saying they swindled people by wrapping newsprint into a bundle and putting a few genuine notes on top, knowing that anyone illegally trying to change money couldn’t complain. The state beauty parlour was always fully booked, with women having their hair permed (not dyed, which was prohibited), and the state restaurants were doing a roaring trade. Most significantly, business was brisk and busy at the open-air local markets.

Markets occupy an ambiguous place in North Korean society. The government tried several times to ban them altogether, or narrowly restrict their opening times, since Kim Jong-il, who was now effectively running the country for his father, declared that they were breeding grounds for every type of unsocialist practice. (He was right about that.) But he couldn’t abolish them while the Public Distribution System kept breaking down or failing to provide people with sufficient essentials. Occasionally, during some crackdown ordered by Pyongyang, the markets would be closed without notice, only to sprout up again within days, like sturdy and fertile weeds. The rules for market traders changed as often as the wind. For many years it was illegal to sell rice because rice was sacred and a gift of the Great Leader. But when I went to the markets, quite regularly with my mother, rice was for sale, along with meat, vegetables, kitchenware, and also Chinese fashions, cosmetics and – concealed beneath mats at enormous personal risk to vendor and buyer alike – cassette tapes of foreign pop music. Goods from Japan were considered the best quality. Next were South Korean products (with the archenemy’s labels and trademarks carefully removed), and lastly Chinese.

My mother wasted no time. Soon she had made contacts among the Chinese traders just across the river in Changbai and was arranging for goods to be sent over, which she would sell on, and make a nice profit. Her chief trading partners were a Mr Ahn and a Mr Chang, both Korean-Chinese, who had houses on the Chinese side of the riverbank.

It was in connection with my mother’s thriving business activities that she took me to a fortune-teller in the second year after we arrived back in Hyesan.

We woke extremely early, while it was still dark. My father and Min-ho were asleep. It was spring, and vivid green shoots were starting to sprout along the empty dirt streets. We hurried to the station to catch the first commuter train for Daeoh-cheon, the village where the fortune-teller woman lived.

My mother knew a number of these mystics and spent a lot of money on them. I was irritable about being woken so early, but she told me that the channel to the spirits is clearest at dawn. ‘She’ll be more accurate.’

My mother also wanted to beat the queue. Sometimes she’d arrive to find the fortune-teller out. A neighbour would say she’d been driven away in a Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows, for a discreet session with a high-ranking Party cadre. North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice.

The fortune-teller’s house was very old. Single-storey, and wood-framed with walls of mud and a thatched roof. I hadn’t known that such houses still existed. It was at a tilt and smelled damp. The lady was elderly, with thick, dishevelled hair. She was raising a granddaughter on her own.

‘I have a question about trade,’ my mother said in a whisper. ‘My Chinese partner has goods. I wish to know when to receive them.’

In other words, she wanted to know the best day to smuggle and not get into trouble. Sometimes, if the date was already fixed, my mother would pay for a ceremony to ward off bad luck.

The lady spilled a fistful of rice on the tabletop and used her fingernails to separate individual grains into portions. She examined this little pile intensely, then she started to speak in a rapid patter. I couldn’t tell if she was addressing us, or the spirits. She spoke of the day on which it was most propitious to receive the goods.

‘When you leave the house that morning, you must step out with your left foot first. Then spread some salt around and pray to the mountain spirit for good fortune.’

My mother nodded. She was satisfied.

‘This is my daughter,’ she said, and told her the time and date of my birth. The fortune-teller looked straight at me in a way that unnerved me. Then she closed her eyes theatrically.

‘Your daughter is clever,’ she said. ‘She has a future connected with music. She will eat foreign rice.’

As we walked back to the station the sun was coming up and the air was beautifully clear and crisp. The crags at the tops of the mountains were etched sharply against the sky but a white mist lingered in the foothills among the pines. My mother walked slowly down the dirt track, holding my hand. She was thinking about the prediction. She interpreted ‘foreign rice’ to mean that I would live overseas. Then she sighed, realizing she’d probably wasted her money. No ordinary North Koreans were allowed to travel abroad, let alone emigrate. That’s how it was with fortune-tellers. They told you things and you chose what you believed. But despite my scepticism about predicting dates for smuggling, I was more accepting of what the woman had said about me. I too thought my future was in music. I had been learning the accordion from a private tutor and was good at it. Accordion playing is popular in North Korea, a legacy from the end of the Second World War when our half of the peninsula was filled with Russian troops of the Soviet Red Army, although the Party never acknowledged any foreign influence on our culture. I thought the old woman’s prophecy meant that I would have a career as a professional accordionist and marry someone from another province. Maybe I would live in Pyongyang. That would be a dream come true. Only privileged people lived there. I fantasized about this for weeks until an event occurred that obliterated my daydreams and cast a shadow over my whole childhood.

Chapter 8
The secret photograph

A few months after the visit to the fortune-teller, during the summer school vacation, my mother had taken Min-ho somewhere and had left me at my grandmother’s house for the day. She was a fascinating woman, intelligent, and always full of stories. Her silver hair was pinned back in the old Korean style, with a needle through the bun. On this particular visit, however, she told me a story that devastated me.

To this day I’m not sure why she did it. She wasn’t being mischievous. And I don’t think her mind was weakening, making her forgetful of what should stay secret. The only explanation I can think of is that she thought I should know the truth while I was young, because I’d find it easier to come to terms with as a girl than if I discovered it later, as a grown woman. If that’s what she was thinking, she made a terrible misjudgement.

It was a warm Saturday morning and the door and windows were open. Outside in the yard, jays were chirping and drinking water from a bowl. We were sitting at her table when she began looking at me with an odd intensity. She said softly: ‘You know, your father isn’t your real father.’

I didn’t take in what she’d said.

She reached across and squeezed my hand. ‘Your name is Kim. Not Park.’

There was a long pause. I didn’t see where this was going, but I might have smiled uncertainly. This could be one of her jokes. Like my mother, she had quite a sense of humour.

Seeing my confusion, she said: ‘It’s the truth.’

She stood and went over to the glass cabinet where she kept her best bowls and plates. It had a small drawer in the bottom. She bent down stiffly. At the back of her neck I could see the string on which she kept her Party card. She retrieved a cardboard envelope, and handed it to me. It smelled damp.

‘Open it.’

I put my hand inside and pulled out a black and white photograph. It showed a wedding party. I recognized my mother at once. She was the bride in the centre, wearing a beautiful chima jeogori. But the scene didn’t make sense. The groom next to her was not my father. He was tall and handsome with slicked-back hair, and dressed in a Western-style suit. Behind them was a vast bronze statue of Kim Il-sung, arm outstretched, as if giving traffic directions.

My grandmother pointed to the groom in the suit. ‘That’s your father. And this lady …’ She pointed to a beautiful woman to the man’s right. ‘… is his sister – your aunt. She’s a film actress in Pyongyang. You strongly resemble her.’ She sighed. ‘Your real father was a nice man, and he loved you a lot.’

The room seemed to go dim. Whatever tethered me to reality had just been cut. I was floating in unreality, and deeply confused.

She explained that my mother had loved my father so much that she could not live with the man she’d married, my biological father. She’d divorced him.

My father is not my father? My eyes started brimming with tears. How could she say that?

I said nothing. She seemed to read the next question forming in my mind. I couldn’t open my mouth to ask it. I think if I’d opened my mouth I would have fallen apart.

‘Min-ho is your half-brother,’ she said, nodding.

I stared at her, but she ploughed on.

‘A couple of years ago, when your mother visited your Uncle Money in Pyongyang, she bumped into your real father in the street …’

A chill went through me. I did not like her calling this person my father.

‘… She had a photo of you in her purse and showed it to him. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at it for a long time, then he slipped it into his pocket before she could stop him, and walked away. So he has your picture.’ My grandmother’s eyes drifted to the window and the mountains. ‘After that, I wrote to his sister the actress to ask what had happened to him. She told me he had remarried soon after the divorce and had twin girls, one of whom he named Ji-hae, after you.’

Ji-hae, my birth name.

A shadow passed over my grandmother’s face. ‘He shouldn’t have done that.’

There is a superstition in North Korea that if someone remarries and gives a child of the second marriage the same name as a child from the previous marriage, the second to receive the name will die.

‘When the girl was young, she fell sick and died.’

I left my grandmother’s house in a daze. I felt hollowed out, tearful and numb at the same time. She’d said nothing about keeping this a secret, but I knew I would never mention it to my mother or my father or anyone. I was too young to know that talking about it is exactly what I should have done. Instead I buried it inside me, and it started to gnaw at my heart. I was still utterly confused. The only thing I kind of understood was that it explained the coolness of my father’s parents toward me, and their generosity toward Min-ho. He had their blood. I didn’t.

When I got home Min-ho was sitting on the floor drawing a picture with coloured crayons. What he’d drawn stunned me, and I felt tears again. And something like anger. It was crude and charming and showed stick figures of me, him, my mother and my father, all holding hands together beneath a shining sun. Inside the sun was a face of a man wearing glasses – Kim Il-sung.

Min-ho was now five years old. He was growing up into a good-natured boy, who liked to help our mother. He had a very cute smile. But now I felt as if a glass wall had gone up between us. He was a half-brother.

Our relationship changed from then on. I became an older sister who provoked him and started fights with him that he could never win. I feel so sorry about that now. My mother would say: ‘What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be more like Min-ho?’

It would be years before I could process maturely the information my grandmother had given me, and reach out to him.

At dinner that evening I said nothing. My mother chatted about some business venture of Aunt Pretty’s; Min-ho was told not to hold his chopsticks in the air; my father was calm as usual, as if nothing had changed. Eventually he said: ‘What’s up with you? You’re as quiet as a little mouse.’

I stared at my bowl. I could not look at him.

In North Korea family is everything. Bloodlines are everything. Songbun is everything. He’s not my father.

I began to push him away and withdraw from him, thinking I had lost my love for him. The pain I was feeling was making me think this.

I began to avoid him.

Chapter 9
To be a good communist

I joined the other children assembling on the street. No one was ever late. We straightened our red scarves, and got into formation. The class leader, who was also our marching-group leader, held up the red banner, and we fell in step behind him, swinging our arms and singing at the tops of our voices.

Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?

Who is the patriot whose deeds shall ever last?

In September 1992 I had started secondary school in Hyesan, and marched there each morning at eight. We knew all the songs so well that we’d fall into harmony spontaneously.

So dear to our hearts is our glorious General’s name,

Our beloved Kim Il-sung of undying fame!

By now the red scarf I’d longed to wear had become an irritation to me. From my mother I was acquiring a distinct care for how I looked. I didn’t want the drab North Korean clothes. I wanted to look different. I’d also grown more conscious of my body after an incident earlier that year, in the spring.

My mother had come to my school to have lunch with me. We were sitting in the sun just outside the school building, eating rice balls on the riverbank, when a boy shouted from my classroom window on the second floor, so loud they would have heard him in China: ‘Hey, Min-young, your mother’s ugly. Not like you.’ There was laughter from other boys behind him. I was only twelve but my face was scarlet with fury. I’d never thought my mother was not pretty. I felt far more humiliated than she did. She actually laughed and told me to calm down. Then she pinched my cheek and said: ‘Boys are noticing you.’

We had classes in Korean, maths, music, art, and ‘communist ethics’ – a curious blend of North Korean nationalism and Confucian traditions that I don’t think had much to do with communism as it is understood in the West. I also began to learn Russian, Chinese characters, geography, chemistry and physics. My father was especially strict with me about learning Chinese calligraphy, which he said was important. Many words in Korean and Japanese derive from ancient Chinese, and although the languages have diverged over time, the people of these nations often find they can communicate through calligraphy. I did not see much point to this, when I had clothes and boys to think about. I did not know that a time would come when I would thank my father in prayers for making me study Chinese. It was a gift of great good fortune from him. One day it would help save my life.

Again, the most important lessons, the most deeply studied subjects, centred on the lives and thoughts of our Leaders Great and Dear. Much of the curriculum was taken up by the cult of Kim. The Kim ‘activities’ of elementary school became serious study in secondary school. The school had a ‘study room’ devoted to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-il’s mother, Kim Jong-suk. It was the most immaculate room in the school, made of the best building materials, and had been paid for with compulsory donations from parents. It was sealed shut so that dust did not settle on the photographs. We took our shoes off outside the door, and could only enter if we were wearing new white socks.

History lessons were superficial. The past was not set in stone, and was occasionally rewritten. My parents had learned at school that Admiral Yi Sun-shin, a naval commander whose tactics had defeated a massive Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century, was one of the great heroes of Korean history. By my day, his heroism had been downgraded. Admiral Yi had tried his best, we were told, but society was still backward at that time, and no figure in Korean history truly stood out until Kim Il-sung emerged as the greatest military commander in the history of humankind.

Lessons were taught with great conviction. The teacher was the only one to ask questions in class, and when she did, the student called upon to answer would stand up, hands at their sides, and shout out the answer as if addressing a regiment. We were not required to formulate any views of our own, or to discuss, or interpret ideas in any subject. Almost all of our homework was simply memorization, which I was good at, and often came top of the class.

Propaganda seeped into every subject. In our geography lesson we used a textbook that showed photographs of parched plots of land, so arid that the mud was cracked. ‘This is a normal farm in South Korea,’ the teacher said. ‘Farmers there can’t grow rice. That’s why the people suffer.’ Maths textbook questions were sometimes worded emotively. ‘In one battle of the Great Fatherland Liberation War, 3 brave uncles of the Korean People’s Army wiped out 30 American imperialist bastards. What was the ratio of the soldiers who fought?’

Everything we learned about Americans was negative. In cartoons they were snarling jackals. In the propaganda posters they were as thin as sticks with hook noses and blond hair. We were told they smelled bad. They had turned South Korea into a ‘hell on earth’ and were maintaining a puppet government there. The teachers never missed an opportunity to remind us of their villainy.

‘If you meet a Yankee bastard on the street and he offers you candy, do not take it!’ one teacher warned us, wagging a finger in the air. ‘If you do, he’ll claim North Korean children are beggars. Be on your guard if he asks you anything, even the most innocent questions.’

We all looked at each other. We had never seen an American. Few Westerners, let alone Americans, ever came to our country, but for some reason the threat of the unseen made this warning all the more chilling.

The teacher also told us to be wary of the Chinese, our allies in communism just across the river. They were envious of us, and not to be trusted. This made sense to me because many of the Chinese-made products I saw at the market were often of dubious quality. The lurid urban myths circulating in Hyesan seemed to confirm the teacher’s words. One story had it that the Chinese used human blood to dye fabrics red. This gave me nightmares. These stories affected my mother, too. When she once found insect eggs in the lining of some underwear she’d bought she wondered if they’d been put there deliberately by the Chinese manufacturer.

One day early in the first semester our teacher had an announcement to make. Training and drilling for the mass games would soon begin. Mass games, he said, were essential to our education. The training, organization and discipline needed for them would make good communists of us. He gave us an example of what he meant, quoting the words of Kim Jong-il: since every child knew that a single slip by an individual could ruin a display involving thousands of performers, every child learned to subordinate their will to that of the collective. In other words, though we were too young to know it, mass games helped to suppress individual thought.

Mass games marked the most sacred dates in the calendar. We practised all year long except during the coldest weeks. Practice was held on the school grounds, which could be especially arduous in the heat of summer, with the final rehearsals in Hyesan Stadium. The highlight of the year was Kim Il-sung’s birthday, on 15 April. I played the drums in the parade. This was followed by the gymnastics and parades for Children’s Day on 2 June, at which we’d march through the city holding tall, streaming red banners. Then we trained for the anniversary of the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War (the Korean War) on 27 July, at which we’d join with other schools to form massed choirs. Shortly after this were the mass games for Liberation Day on 15 August (which commemorated the end of Japanese rule), and Party Foundation Day, on 10 October. There was little time left over in the year for proper education or private pursuits.

I didn’t enjoy these vast events. They were nerve-wracking and stressful. But no one complained and no one was excused. My friends and I were assigned to the card section of the mass games in Hyesan Stadium, which was made up of thousands of children executing an immaculately drilled display of different coloured cards flipped and held up to form a sequence of giant images – all timed to music, gymnastics or marching. Though none of us said it, we all used to worry about the ‘single slip’ that could ruin the entire display. That filled me with terror. We practised endlessly, and to perfection. Each of us had a large pack containing all our cards, which we displayed in order. We were led by a conductor who stood at the front holding up the number of the next card. When she gave the signal, everyone held up that card in unison. The final pattern in the display formed a vast image of the Great Leader’s face with a shimmering gold wreath around it, which the children moved to give it a dazzle effect. We never got to see the visual display that we were creating, but when the stadium was full, and we heard the roar of the crowd, with tens of thousands chanting ‘Long life!’ over and over – ‘MAN–SAE! MAN–SAE! MAN–SAE!’ – the adrenalin was electrifying.

At the end of that first year at secondary school the ceremonies held on the anniversary of the Korean War affected me deeply and made me very emotional. The day began at school with outdoor speeches from our teachers and headmaster. They opened with the solemn words, spoken into a microphone: ‘On the morning of 25 June 1950, at 3 a.m., the South Korean enemy attacked our country while our people slept, and killed many innocents …’

The images conjured for us of tanks rolling across the border and slaughtering our people in their homes moved us all to floods of tears. The South Koreans had made victims of us. I burned with thoughts of vengeance and righting injustice. All the children felt the same. We talked afterwards of what we would do to a South Korean if we ever saw one.

Despite the endless and exhausting communal activities I had one private realm I could escape to: in books. Reading was a habit I’d picked up from my mother. I had picture books of fairytales, myths and folktales. I had a Korean edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, a story I loved – but it had some pages glued together by the censor, and it was impossible to peel them apart. Tales of heroes struggling against oppression were permitted as long as they fitted the North Korean revolutionary worldview, but any inconvenient details got blotted out.

By the second year of secondary school I was reading North Korean spy thrillers. Some of them were so gripping they kept me up late, by candlelight. The best one was about a North Korean special agent operating in South Korea. He lived there with his South Korean wife, never telling her his true identity. He was controlled directly by the head of secret espionage operations, a figure he’d never met face to face but with whom he’d formed a relationship over time. The story climaxes when he discovers that his controller is his own wife. The best stories had endings that were obvious all along and yet took the reader completely by surprise.

One evening at the start of my second year at secondary school, I came home to find my mother cooking a special dinner to mark my father’s first day in a new job. I had known for a while that he was leaving the air force, but I wasn’t talking to him much these days, and taking little interest in what he told me. When he arrived home, I saw him wearing a civilian suit for the first time. He looked smart, and quite different. I was so used to seeing his grey-blue uniform. He was now working for a trading company, which was controlled by the military. He was grinning broadly, and said he would be crossing into China next week on business. He showed me his new passport. I had never seen a passport before, but affected a lack of interest. My mother, however, was in high spirits. A husband with permission to travel abroad was a real mark of status. We were moving up in the world.

The only time I spoke to him over dinner, and not very respectfully, was to ask what he actually did in this fancy new job. He gave some vague, unspecific response. Clearly it was supposed to be some big secret. I rolled my eyes and left the table, which angered my mother. My father remained silent. I knew I had hurt him, but I felt more resentful towards him than ever. This was yet another fact being kept hidden from me. The pain I felt over the truth about my parentage had not lessened at all. I did not realize that in not telling me about his job he was trying to protect me.

My father began crossing into China on business, sometimes staying away for a night or two. It was very fortunate, therefore, that he happened to be at home with my mother on the evening of the fire.

About two months later, I had gone to bed very early, aching and exhausted after mass games practice, and was already asleep next to Min-ho when my mother’s cry awoke me, and my father came crashing into the room. Behind him was a flickering orange light, and everywhere a sharp reek of aviation fuel. We saved nothing from the house but the clothes we had on and the portraits my father had snatched from the wall, just seconds before the roof collapsed. All my picture books, my novels, and my beloved accordion and guitar were destroyed.

But there was something else I treasured that was also destroyed by the fire. Something so dangerous to possess that it could have got us sent to a prison camp. Looking back, the fire may have been a mighty stroke of luck.

Chapter 10
‘Rocky island’

A few months before the fire one of my best friends had gathered a close-knit group of us together in the schoolyard. I tended to make friends with older girls, from similar backgrounds. This friend was the daughter of the city’s chief of police. She’d heard that cassette tapes of illegal South Korean pop music could be bought, very discreetly, from certain dealers.

Soon we were in possession of some of this red-hot criminal contraband. We were among the first in North Korea to hear these new hits.

A small group of us began secretly meeting up on the weekends in the houses of one of us, and when parents and siblings were out we’d dance and sing along to the music of the South Korean singers Ju Hyun-mi and Hyun Chul, twirling around and jiving our hips, keeping the volume low. We made up our own moves. In truth we had very little idea of how people danced to pop. We knew we were not supposed to enjoy the archenemy’s music, but we did not realize quite how grave our crime was until news spread around Hyesan that some local women had been sentenced to a prison camp for partying to South Korean pop. One in their group had denounced the others.

After that I listened to the tapes alone at home, lying on my bed.

My favourite was a song called ‘Rocky Island’ by the singer Kim Weon-joong. The rocky island of the title referred to a woman he loved, and the chorus went:

Even if you don’t like me, I love you so much,

Even if I can’t wake up, I love you so much …

I adored this mush. It was about teenage love, and touched my heart in a way that filled me with longing. It was changing me, making me feel I was growing up. I got nothing like this from North Korean music. Our country had pop music of its own, but with songs called ‘Our Happiness in our General’s Embrace’ or ‘Young People, Forward!’ I cringed to listen to it.

I taught myself to play ‘Rocky Island’ on my accordion. I took care to play quietly, keeping the door and windows shut, but one morning while I was practising a hard knock sounded on the front door.

I froze.

One of our neighbours was on the doorstep. He was on his way to work. He told me he had heard me playing.

A pool of cold fear gathered in the pit of my stomach. Was he going to denounce me, or just warn me? But to my great surprise he smiled and told me that hearing that song made him emotional and gave him energy. Then he got back on his bicycle and rode off. It was such a weird thing to say. I wonder now if he knew full well it was a South Korean song and was reaching out to me, giving me a signal, like a secret handshake.

A few months later, by the time the illicit pop cassettes had gone up in flames with the house, I knew all the songs off by heart. The melody and lyrics of ‘Rocky Island’, especially, would be a great comfort to me in the times ahead.

The South Korean pop songs had given me a vague awareness of a universe beyond the borders of North Korea. If I’d had more awareness in general I might have spotted clues indicating that the world outside was undergoing dramatic changes – changes so great that the regime was being put under stresses it had never experienced before. I was oblivious to the fact that the Russians had allowed communism to collapse in the Soviet Union, ‘without even a shot fired’, as Kim Jong-il would put it. But this was affecting our country in ways that were starting to become impossible for the regime to conceal. My parents’ jobs and business dealings meant that we had enough food. I had not yet noticed that the rations of basic food essentials provided by the Public Distribution System were dwindling or becoming irregular, nor had I paid attention when the government launched a widely publicized campaign in 1992 called ‘Let us eat two meals a day’, which it said was healthier than eating three. Anyone who hadn’t yet figured out a moneymaking hustle of their own was still depending on the state for essentials, and they were beginning to suffer.

As it happened, our next move as a family took us to the very edge of that world outside, as close to it as anyone could go, as if fortune was contriving to make us look outward. Our new house faced directly onto the bank of the Yalu River itself. I could throw a stone from our front gate over the water into China.

Chapter 11
‘The house is cursed’

Our new neighbourhood was a cluster of single-storey homes separated by narrow alleys. The house was larger than previous houses we’d lived in, painted white, with a tiled roof, and surrounded by a white concrete wall. It had three rooms, each the width of the building, so that we had to go through the kitchen area to the main room and through that to the back room, which is where the four of us slept.

My mother had paid a lot of money for it. Officially, there is no private property in North Korea, and no real-estate business, but in reality people who have been allocated desirable or conveniently located housing often do sell or swap them if the price is right.

The location of this house was perfect for my mother’s illicit enterprises. She could arrange for goods to be smuggled from just a few yards away in China, straight over the river to our front door. For security against the rampant thievery she had the wall around the house built higher, to about six feet, and bought a fierce, trained dog from the military. The entrance was through a gate in the front wall, that we kept heavily locked. We had to pass through a total of three doors and five locks just to come and go. In front of the house was a path that ran along the riverside, five yards from our front gate, along which the guards patrolled in pairs. Uncle Opium and Aunt Pretty dropped by and congratulated my mother. The location couldn’t be better, they said.

Min-ho was extremely excited about this new home. It was a warm, mild autumn and the day we moved in he saw boys his own age playing in the river, mixing with Chinese boys from the other side, while their mothers washed clothes along the banks. To most North Koreans, the borders are impassable barriers. Our country is sealed shut from neighbouring countries. And yet here were five-, six- and seven-year-old boys splashing and flitting between the two banks, North Korea’s and China’s, like the fish and the birds.

The next day my mother went to introduce herself to the neighbours. What they told her made her heart sink to her stomach. She returned to the house looking angry and pale.

‘The house is cursed,’ she said, slumping to the floor and covering her face with her hands. ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

A neighbour had told her that a child of the previous occupants had died in an accident. My mother thought she’d been lucky to find the place, but in fact the occupants were selling in a hurry to escape the association with tragedy and bad luck. I tried to comfort her, but she shook her head and looked tired. Her superstitions ran too deep to be reasoned with. I half-believed it myself. Many of my mother’s beliefs were rubbing off on me. I could tell she was already thinking of another expensive session with a fortune-teller to see if she could get the curse lifted.

My mother quickly furnished the house, once again doing her makeover. People who could afford them had started buying refrigerators coming from China, but my mother was reluctant to attract attention. This meant daily shopping for food, almost all of which she obtained at the local semi-official markets, not from the Public Distribution System. Her director at the government bureau where she worked had recently been sent to a prison camp after inspectors had found food in his home that he had been given as a bribe, so my mother was especially careful. We never stocked up on rice – seldom keeping more than twenty or thirty kilos in the house.

The one luxury we did buy for the new house was a Toshiba colour television, which was a signal of social status. The television would expand my horizon, and Min-ho’s, dramatically. Not for the ‘news’ it broadcast – we had one channel, Korea Central Television, which showed endlessly repeated footage of the Great Leader or the Dear Leader visiting factories, schools or farms and delivering their on-the-spot guidance on everything from nitrate fertilizers to women’s shoes. Nor for the entertainment, which consisted of old North Korean movies, Pioneers performing in musical ensembles, or vast army choruses praising the Revolution and the Party. Its attraction was that we could pick up Chinese TV stations that broadcast soap operas and glamorous commercials for luscious products. Though we could not understand Mandarin, just watching them provided a window onto an entirely different way of life. Watching foreign TV stations was highly illegal and a very serious offence. Our mother scolded us severely when she caught us. But I was naughty. I’d put blankets over the windows and watch when she was out, or sleeping.

We were now living in a sensitive area, politically. The government knew that people living along the river often succumbed to the poison of capitalism and traded smuggled goods, watched pernicious foreign television programmes, and even defected. Families living in this area were monitored much more closely than others by the Bowibu for any sign of disloyalty. A family that fell under suspicion might be watched and reported on daily by the local police. Often, subterfuge was used to catch offenders. One morning not long after we’d moved in, a pleasant and friendly man knocked on the door and told my mother that he had heard that the Yankees paid a lot of money for the returned remains of their soldiers killed during the Korean War. He had some bones himself, he said, disinterred from various sites in the province. He wondered if my mother could help him smuggle them across the border.

My mother treated requests for help with extreme caution. She knew how undercover Bowibu agents operated, dropping by with intriguing propositions. They had all kinds of tricks. We’d heard of one high-ranking family who had got into serious trouble when investigators turned up at their children’s kindergarten and asked brightly: ‘What’s the best movie you’ve seen lately?’ and a child had enthusiastically described a South Korean blockbuster, watched on illegal video. On this occasion, however, her superstitions were her best defence. She didn’t want to be haunted by the disturbed spirits of American soldiers, and told the man she couldn’t help.

In mid-November, a few weeks after we had moved to the new house, the first snow had been falling all day in fine grains that stung our faces. We were huddled on the floor for warmth, wearing our coats indoors, when my father arrived home. Each time he returned from China he brought with him small luxuries that were out of reach for most people. Sometimes he came with good-quality toilet paper, or bananas and oranges, which were almost never available at home. This time he was carrying such an enormous package that I failed to affect my usual boredom in his presence. I was too curious to know what it was. It contained gifts for Min-ho and me. Mine was a larger-than-life doll with silky white-blonde hair, blue eyes and a pale Western face. She had the most beautiful dress, of patterned gingham trimmed with lace. She was so large I could barely carry her. I had to prop her up in a corner next to my bed. My mother said she could hear me chattering to her. Min-ho’s gift was a hand-held Game Boy video game. His little face was overawed. This was something so new. We knew of no one else who had anything like it.

I can only think of that doll now with immense sadness. I was a little too old for a doll, but it was such a beautiful, generous gift. I realize now that my father felt he had lost me and was trying to reconnect with me, somehow. He knew something had gone badly wrong between us, and he had probably figured out what it was. I certainly did not deserve the gift.

It was the last thing he ever gave me.

Chapter 12
Tragedy at the bridge

I was about to turn fourteen, by the Korean way of measuring age. It was January 1994, the beginning of an eventful and tragic year that made me grow up quickly.

I was now almost as tall as my mother. I was fit and active, playing a lot of sport, which I enjoyed very much – ice skating, becoming good enough to represent the school in a tournament, and taekwondo indoors when the weather was cold. I was a good runner, and had run the Hyesan half-marathon.

My birthday, however, got the year off to a terrible start.

I had long been pushing my luck with my appearance. The teachers had never taken much notice when I didn’t wear the school uniform – they knew they could depend on my mother when the school needed cash donations, or fuel for heating. But I was not a child any more, and my nonconformity was becoming conspicuous.

The inevitable happened.

A new teacher had joined the school a few months previously. Her name was Mrs Kang, and she taught physics. She was a young woman, with small, sharp eyes and a shrill voice. On the day of my birthday she wished us good morning, and noticed me immediately. Every girl was in school uniform and all had short hair, no longer than shoulder length. I stood out a mile in my pink Chinese coat and my perm, and a new pair of tall, fashionable boots.

Her eyes froze on the boots, and I knew I’d gone too far.

‘Why are you wearing those?’ She was addressing me in front of the whole class. ‘And for that matter, why aren’t you ever in uniform, like everyone else?’

Before I could stop myself the words were out. ‘Why do you have a problem? My mother doesn’t.’

The room tensed.

‘How dare you talk back to me!’ She was shrieking, and marching up to my desk. ‘You want to look like some rotten capitalist? Fine!’ She swung her arm out and slapped me hard across the face.

I put my hand to my cheek. The blood was singing in my ears. I was shaking, and outraged. My mother had never slapped me. I stormed out of the class, and ran home in tears.

That day, for the first time in a long time, I yearned for the comfort and security my father always provided, but he was away again, on a business trip to China. Each time he came home he seemed more and more tired and subdued. My mother said he wasn’t sleeping. Something was wrong. He’d told her he thought he was being watched.

I realize now that having the nerve to wear those boots and perm my hair was just a symptom of a deeper and general disillusion I was feeling. I was falling out of love with the ‘organizational life’ and the collective activities that no one in the country was exempt from. Now that I was fourteen I was no longer a Pioneer, and had to join the Socialist Youth League. This was another important milestone. We were told to start thinking of our futures, and of how we would serve our country. My childhood was over.

Members of the Socialist Youth League had to undergo military training. I had to put on army fatigues and learn how to shoot with live ammunition at a firing range in Hyesan. I hated this so much, and my mother was so nervous about me being surrounded by children with guns, where accidents could easily happen, and sometimes did, that she got me excused by bribing the school authorities with cash.

Ideological indoctrination intensified. As model communist youths we were now expected to deepen our emotional bond with the Great Leader, and start learning about the Party’s ideology of juche (loosely translated as ‘self-reliance’), which promoted our country’s isolation and rejection of all foreign influences.

I was now part of a Socialist Youth League ‘cell’ within my secondary school. Fortunately, I managed to avoid joining the Maintenance of Social Order Brigade – the vigilantes who monitored the streets for citizens whose ideological purity had lapsed. By 1994 there were several additions to the list of banned items. Now the youths were cracking down on anyone caught wearing clothing with Western lettering, which was in vogue in China.

By the time spring came there was no avoiding the revolutionary duty we all had to undertake: the pilgrimage to the sacred sites surrounding Mount Paektu. The mountains of Ryanggang Province were where Kim Il-sung fought as a guerrilla against the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s. To mark this significance, three of the province’s eleven counties were renamed after the great man’s wife, father and uncle. Young Pioneers and Socialist Youth from all over North Korea visited this ‘outdoor revolutionary museum’, with its statues and monuments to the Great Leader’s victories, and a nearby village called Pochonbo, where in 1937 he had led a band of 150 guerrillas in an attack on the local Japanese police station. The battle is famous in North Korean history as the great turning point in the struggle for Korean independence, and stunning proof of Kim Il-sung’s tactical genius, winning victory in the face of overwhelming odds.

Our guide showed us bullet holes on the old police station, circled in white, and a cell where the Japanese had tortured communist partisans. None of this impressed me. I just wanted to get out of there. With a tremendous effort I had to control my face to hide my boredom.

Only when I finally saw, with my own eyes, the preserved log cabin beneath the pines on the slopes of Mount Paektu, the site of the secret guerrilla base where Kim Jong-il was born, did I feel like a child again, just for a moment. I remembered painting the cabin, and the star in the sky, and the rainbow over Mount Paektu. This magical story still had the power to move me.

The disaffection I was feeling meant that my relationship with Min-ho wasn’t getting any better. He was at elementary school in Hyesan. He’d hear from the boys in his year what a cute girl their older brothers thought I was. He must have thought they were talking about someone else. I still wasn’t friends with him in the way I should have been. Deep down I wanted an older brother to protect me, not a kid I had to watch out for. He was now seven years old and developing quite an adventurous streak – I strongly suspected him of making secret forays of his own to the opposite bank of the river. He could be dogged, too. Given a chore, he’d get on with it. His school once gave the students an absurd quota of ten kilos each of berries to pick. He was the only one to hit the target. In that sense he was quite unlike me, who would find excuses to avoid physical work and not get my nice clothes dirty. The one thing we both had in common was the Hyesan stubbornness, like our mother’s.

A few days after the visit to Mount Paektu I came home from school to find my mother pacing around the house in a state of high anxiety.

‘Your father’s still not back,’ she said, folding and unfolding her arms.

My father was supposed to have returned from his business trip to China the previous day. She said he had seemed particularly anxious before leaving.

Two days went by and still he did not return.

By the third day my mother was a wreck. She could not relax, sleep, eat, or sit still. She tried several times to contact the bureau of the trading company where he worked, but each time was stonewalled and told to wait for information.

Another day passed in a dismal limbo. Min-ho was constantly asking if someone could check where our father was.

Finally, a work colleague from the trading company called at the house.

The news was not good.

My father had been arrested four days ago at the Friendship Bridge as he crossed the border back into North Korea.

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