A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea(10)

In the great egalitarian paradise of North Korea, you sure got to know your place quickly. If you were well connected and had friends in the League of Koreans in Japan or in the Korean Workers’ Party, you got to live in the capital, Pyongyang, or Wonsan, the country’s second-largest city. But if you had no connections, forget it. At the local level, neighbors were clustered into groups of five families each, with a leader who was tasked with reporting everything about the members of the group to the secret police. Even if you were nobody. And being nobody, you were automatically suspect. People like that got sent to remote villages to work as serfs. And by “people like that,” I really mean people like us. In North Korea, we were once more the lowest of the low.

We were constantly monitored by the goons of the State Security of North Korea and the secret police. I guess we posed a double threat. We’d brought some dangerous items with us from Japan when we moved—things like bicycles and electrical appliances and half-decent clothes. What if the local villagers came to realize that their standard of living was pitiful? Worse still, what would happen if they got wind of the concept of free thought from us? They might question the wisdom of Kim Il-sung. And that was verboten.

We moved to North Korea to escape from our life of poverty in Japan. We didn’t see ourselves as taking part in some heroic endeavor to build a future socialist utopia. And now that we were in North Korea? Now what? Well, one thing became clear pretty rapidly. My father’s income was nowhere near enough to support a family of six, and we were eating far less well than we had in Japan.

All adults were expected to work. Basically, the ethic was “No work, no dinner.” Fine. The only trouble was, the party officials in the village wouldn’t give my mother a job since she couldn’t speak Korean. She was a very capable woman. She had some technical qualifications, a mathematics certification, and nursing experience, among other things—but none of that made any difference to the party. Eventually, the villagers learned that she was knowledgeable about childbirth, and they would come to her for help with their births. Still they treated her like a third-class citizen, and the party itself continued to view her as worthless. So most days, my mother would simply walk to the mountain behind our house and pick weeds and anything else edible to supplement our diet.

In addition to struggling to find enough food for us, my mother had difficulty cooking it. All she had to work with was a primitive woodstove. The quantity of firewood she could find varied from day to day, so regulating the heat was problematic. The rice she cooked was usually either half-raw or burned. But my father never complained. He always ate her rice with relish. That was the only good thing about moving to North Korea—my father’s transformation. Looking back on it now, the small kindnesses he showed were the least he could do.

My sisters and I were growing fast and always hungry. We were soon fed up with eating nothing but rice. My father sold one of our precious bikes and some of the clothes we’d brought with us to party officials in the village. Armed with a little hard cash at last, he set off for the farmers’ market on the outskirts of the village. The state controlled food distribution, and private sales were technically banned. Even so, a blind eye was sometimes turned, and farmers could get away with selling a few vegetables and eggs on the side. As you can imagine, the prices were exorbitant—sometimes ten times higher than the official price.

To our astonishment, my father came back with a pig, a sheep, and a chicken. We decided to keep them in the yard. To my sisters, these animals were like new toys, even though we were raising them for food. I hadn’t seen my sisters so excited in a long time.

But that very same afternoon, the village policeman barged into our yard like he owned the place and started poking around. He was a sinister-looking fellow, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. I didn’t want to look into those terrifying eyes, so I just averted my gaze and concentrated on making the pig feed.

“You stupid Japanese bastard! What are you thinking? Putting rice in the pig feed . . . Rice is for humans, you little shit!”

I was too scared to speak. The rice he was raving about consisted of a few measly grains that had dropped on the floor at lunchtime. I knew I couldn’t simply throw them away, so I’d picked them up grain by grain and added them to the pig feed. And now I was being accused of profligacy.

My father burst out of the house, grabbed the policeman by the collar, and decked him. The Tiger of the black market had returned. But not for long. When the policeman finally got back on his feet, he pulled out his gun, wild-eyed. My father stepped back. “Okay, okay. I got the message. No need to shoot me.” The policeman shoved his gun in my father’s back and barked at him to march toward the police station. My father looked back at me. “Don’t worry!” he cried out as he walked away.

My mother and I feared the worst as we waited and waited for his return. When he finally staggered in around midnight, he couldn’t walk properly, and his face was bloody and grotesquely swollen. I hadn’t ever liked my father or felt much sympathy for him, but a new feeling stirred inside me that night.

“You have to be careful. All of you. Christ, those fuckers deceived me. The fucking League of Koreans!” he raved. He was shaking, and not just with anger. I could tell something in him had been broken. He was terrified.

I’d never seen him frightened by anything before. When we lived in Japan, if anyone crossed him, he’d simply punch their lights out. Even when he was arrested, he didn’t care. But now he was scared, plain and simple. And that scared me to death. When I saw the terror in his eyes and heard the miserable realization in his voice, I knew once and for all that we’d been consigned to hell. It made my flesh crawl to think about it. My father had bought a pig, a chicken, and a sheep to feed his family, and some jealous neighbor had seen fit to rat him out for this gross misdemeanor. And that policeman would happily have killed him for it.