A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea(8)
When we pulled up to the quay, several North Koreans came on board to help with our disembarkation. Their clothes, their shoes, everything about them, made it clear at once that these denizens of paradise were infinitely poorer than we’d ever been during our tough life in Japan. As we trudged down the gangway, I kept thinking about one of the documents we’d received. It referred to some kind of “application for return” and said something to the effect of, “If you wish to return to Japan at any stage, even if you are on the verge of entering North Korea, inform any member of the Red Cross staff around you immediately.” I looked around frantically for a Red Cross employee, but my father placed his palm against my shoulder blades and pushed me forward. I had no choice but to keep walking down that gangway.
Born again.
We were shepherded onto buses and taken to reception centers in the city. I stared out the window, feeling desolate as I looked for anything that might give me hope. I saw only a few houses on the way into town. The landscape was dreary, still scarred by bomb craters left over from the Korean War. Once we arrived, we were interviewed by officials who decided each person’s future occupation and accommodation. Just like that. I couldn’t believe how casual my father was. When he was asked where he wanted to go, he simply said, “Anywhere is okay. I don’t know the names of any places in North Korea. I’m happy to go wherever.” He was so confident and optimistic, but I couldn’t believe he had just placed us at the mercy of the officials.
My mother, however, was racked with anxiety. I’ll never forget the look of sheer panic and terror on her face. “What’s going to happen to us?” she asked, her voice shaking. “Never mind. It’ll be okay,” my father kept saying. I kept silent. How could he be so confident that everything would be fine? Looking back at that day, I think language played a role. At last, he could speak his native Korean again. At last he belonged. This sense of relief seemed to seep into the rest of his thinking. I could see him relaxing into his mother tongue, and this gave him confidence about everything else.
Of course, like my mother, I was anxious about the future, but for me—a fast-growing thirteen-year-old—the most alarming thing was when we sat down to our first meal. I couldn’t believe the dish that appeared in front of me. They served us dog meat. Yes, dog meat. The stench was overpowering. We were ravenous, so we held our noses, but even then we gagged. I really tried to overcome my nausea, but none of us could get so much as a bite down. Except my father.
It was strictly forbidden for us to leave the reception center. So there we were—the beneficiaries of smug humanitarianism—prisoners in paradise on earth. Each family was given one room about six tatami mats wide. Icy gusts of wind blew into the room through the flimsy walls, and gravel pelted our cheeks. That first night, as we all lay side by side, shivering on the freezing-cold floor, I wondered what was going to become of us. My sisters just kept calling out to me softly, plaintively, “Brother! Brother!” They were exhausted, trembling with cold, and scared. I wanted to comfort them but couldn’t think of much to say.
We spent several weeks in this state of limbo, sitting in the cold day after day and shivering on the floor night after night, fearful of the future and uncertain what awaited us. I tried not to think about anything—to ignore my memories of the life I’d left behind and not imagine what our life here would look like.
A few weeks later, our destiny was determined. Our future home was to be in the village of Dong Chong-ri. I was nervous about this place I’d never heard of, but figured it had to be an improvement over the confines of the reception center. The journey took about twelve hours by steam train and another hour by oxcart. When we pulled slowly into the snowbound village, the oxcart came to a stop and we clambered down. My youngest sister, Masako, fell into the snow and began to cry. Soon she was wailing uncontrollably. She’d somehow withstood the horrors of our situation until that moment, but her tumble into the snow was the last straw. She’d just turned six, and her whole little life had been turned upside down in a few short weeks.
She kept wailing, “I want to go home!” as tears streamed down her cheeks. I was stunned when my father picked her up to soothe her. I’d never seen him show any fatherly affection before. He spoke to her softly and tried to calm her down as our guide led us down the road. I looked around at the ramshackle cottages with their thatched roofs sprinkled with snow. It sounds picturesque. But it wasn’t. It was desolate.
The house that we were destined to call home was being used as a party office. It was the village’s only building with a tiled roof. Our guide became excited, almost hysterical, as he pointed it out. Apparently, it was “a great honor to live in such a house.” I looked at the thing in all its jerry-rigged glory, its walls riddled with cracks. I was puzzled. Did he really believe what he was saying? If so, I could almost have wept for him. Except that I was the one who had to live there.
A belligerent-looking woman was waiting for us by the door. She spoke to us in a hectoring, hysterical tone that was to become very familiar to me in the years to come. I later discovered that she was the chairperson of the local Democratic Women’s Union. She’d dragged over some of our neighbors to welcome us. They were waiting inside. As soon as we crossed the threshold, she launched into a speech.
“These people were bullied in Japan, but thanks to the warmth and kindness of Grand Marshal Kim Il-sung, they could come back to their mother country!”