A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea(16)

“She’s Japanese,” I said. “She doesn’t need to change her name.”

“You’re living in North Korea. You must change your name!” he cried, bellowing into her face. “You must use a North Korean name!”

“Don’t you touch her!” I said, running over to defend her. “If you so much as lay a finger on her, I’ll kill you!”

He seemed to wilt a little at that.

My mother couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but even so, she looked very scared.

The police officer threw back his shoulders and stuck out his chest in a totally unconvincing attempt to look big.

“Well,” he blustered, “change your name . . . for next time!”

Whatever that meant.

And with that, he stomped out of the house.

I turned to my mother and told her not to worry about it. I didn’t want to say more for fear of worrying her.

She sighed and pulled on her frayed rucksack. She looked so frail and weary, as if she lacked the energy anymore to even be afraid.

“I need to go forage for food for dinner.”

And with that, she plodded wearily up the mountain to search for bracken, ferns, wild mushrooms—anything remotely edible. She wore baggy work pants covered with patches and ragged shoes. I wanted to cry like she sometimes did. She often broke down and sobbed for hours at a time. I tried to console her, but I could never find the words. They didn’t exist.

When I was in high school, I really believed that if I only studied hard enough, I could find a way out of my situation and save my family. Despite the house-fire catastrophe and the discrimination we faced every day, I was genuinely convinced that if I put in enough effort, I could escape this awful predicament and find a way forward into a better life for myself and my family. As graduation approached, I studied harder than ever.

One day, three months before graduation, the teacher handed out a form. We had to fill in what we wanted to do after graduation and describe our future dreams. It was a cruel exercise since we had no real choice in the matter. But I didn’t know that yet. Physics was my best subject, and I wanted to study physics at university and then become a researcher. I wrote dutifully:

I want to go to university and study physics.

Someone asked me what I’d written, so I told him. Some of my classmates overheard what I said and started laughing at me.

“Ha! This guy wants to go to university,” a classmate said.

More people started laughing. I couldn’t understand it, so as you can imagine, I lost my temper. “Yeah. I want to go to university. What is wrong with that?” I said.

I found out the next day during my counseling session, which was kindly offered by the school principal and my class teacher. This “academic and career counseling” turned out to be a total joke. I learned that after high school graduation in North Korea, there were three paths to choose from. Except there weren’t. In reality, your path was chosen for you. Basically, if you were clever and your birth and background were good enough, you were sent to university. If you were physically strong, you went to the military academy or became a common soldier. The rest were sent to workplaces as laborers. The most important factor in path determination was not how hard you worked but your assigned caste.

The three castes were “nucleus” (or “core”), “basic” (or “wavering”), and “hostile.” Three criteria determined your caste: your birth and background, your perceived loyalty to the party, and your connections. Academic achievements had nothing to do with it, no matter how excellent they were. Your whole life was determined by which caste you’d been consigned to. If you were deemed “core,” a rosy future awaited you. But if you were deemed “hostile,” you were the lowest of the low and would remain so for life. No career path. No chance of bettering yourself. No way out.

It turned out the school principal was just another party apparatchik. On that particular day, his job was to inform me of which caste I’d been consigned to. I was told that I’d been deemed “hostile.” And that was that.

My head was spinning. I felt like I was about to sink through the floor, as if I were plunging into an abyss. Questions jostled for position in my mind. Deemed? By whom? What for? Hadn’t I studied hard? Hadn’t I worked hard for the party? Had it all been a waste of time and effort? What was going to happen to my family now?

I’d known that North Korea was no “paradise on earth” ever since I set foot in the place. But I’d thought that going to university was my one chance to better my position. After all, back in Japan, that had been one of the enticements to move to North Korea. They’d promised that we would get a good education for free. It was a huge incentive. But also a complete, barefaced lie. It’s difficult to put into words what this discovery did to me. I was totally and utterly shattered. The realization that I was consigned to spend the rest of my life at the very bottom of society with no chance of escape came crashing down on my head like an avalanche. I lost all hope for the future, and I felt like a part of me died that day.

The following day, some documents arrived from the People’s Committee Bureau of Labor. Knowing that no amount of effort or work would make any difference to my future, I didn’t care what kind of job I would get. With one exception. If you were a farmer, there was no hope of promotion—and no chance of ever escaping the village. Like my father. So when it came time to fill in the part of the form where you had to say what kind of job you hoped to do, I wrote: