Jia: A Novel of North Korea (5 page)

Her desperate resistance against her parents rescued my
father, but in effect she sacrificed herself: niy grandparents
abandoned their daughter permanently and kept a close
watch on my father. The marriage was not welcomed by
anyone; even my parents' friends were afraid of being punished for associating with them. The only ones who were
happy were my father and mother.

My father's self-respect was as strong as his desire
to study; nobody could daunt him. He got his position
back in the college, owing to my mother's efforts, but it
didn't change his attitude toward the college and toward
his in-laws.

A terrible event involving his closest friend, Sungwoo, who had a similar background, only strengthened his
resistance to the government. Sungwoo couldn't go to university, so he worked in a factory after graduation. Then,
one day, he just disappeared. He had been playing poker with his coworkers during their breaks for some time,
though it was prohibited (as a "vestige of Japanese imperialism"); people played anyway, and the local government
wasn't strict about it. Sungwoo was an exception. When
their game was discovered, his coworkers were let off, but
Sungwoo was sent to a political concentration camp. His
behavior was said to be against the government; his family
didn't have the preferred background, so his sentence was
compounded.

My father tried to find Sungwoo, appealing to the central government about the local government's unfair treatment, but to no avail. Sungwoo was simply erased from his
community. After that, my father became increasingly cynical. He publicly criticized the research conditions and lack
of funding at the college, and he complained that school
staff members were busy using the money to curry favor
with their superiors. He dismissed the political science
classes, which taught the ideology of Kim 11 Sung. "What
department am I in, science or politics?" he would say.
Eventually, he was dragged away by two soldiers and taken
to the Investigation Bureau. His worst offense was the possession of foreign science books from prohibited countries.
Nobody knew how he got the books; he had sought them
out on his own.

The scandal brought trouble to my family. My father
cursed the investigators dispatched from the government.
He disappeared several days later; the charge was political treason. People said he would be sent to one of the strictest political concentration camps, a place in the mountains,
where no one could find him. My mom looked for him,
running from village to village, begging her parents for
help. At the time, she was pregnant with me: a little sister
for her eight-year-old daughter.

Her parents, however, cared more about their status
than for their only daughter. Both sets of parents asked her
to get a divorce so she wouldn't be soiled with my father's
crimes. But my mom also was obstinate, and she refused
to leave my father's family. Several days later, a military
truck took my mom, my sister, and my father's parents and
dropped them in a political offenders' village. They were
not allowed to bring any belongings. Their crime was their
relation to my father.

The village was located right next to a political concentration camp. My grandparents and my mother worked
for the camp, serving the guards. They hoped to run into
my father, though they had no confirmation of his whereabouts. The first words they exchanged after returning from
work each day were "Have you seen him?" They were not
allowed to talk to prisoners; they could only check their
faces as they passed.

That is the story of why I never saw my father and spent
my childhood in an isolated compound. My mother believed her parents had prevented our family from actually
being sent to the camp, and she hoped that someday they
would help us return to our regular lives. The girl who
could have anything she wanted had now lost everything.

I don't blame my father. I understand why he remained
so steadfast. How desperate he must have been when he realized he couldn't live out his passion for study and research! What had he learned from his own father's history? My
grandmother said my father respected my grandfather with
his whole heart. They had different interests, but they both
believed in being true to their passions.

Life hasn't changed so much since their time. Just as they
did, I must do battle with capricious political winds in order to survive each day.

---here we lived, the temperature rose and fell with
the wind. Fall was slipping into winter; leaves were
falling from the trees, which themselves were becoming
shorter and skinnier as the ground grew softer and taller.
Piles of leaves meant that it was time to prepare for winter.
The cold pinched at our flesh; sometimes the snow was as
deep as I was tall. No matter how cold it got, however, I
still pressed for my sister to take me outside. My grandparents were worried I might get another disease from exposure, but being stuck inside only made me sicker.

One typical day, I was nagging my sister to take me
outside to play while she ate lunch. I often dictated the
day's plan to her, usually including swimming in the pond
for two hours or finding five grasshoppers per person. She
kept silent, and I watched her spoon move up and down. That meant "no." I was persistent. I was such a willful girl,
and my sister never rejected my begging. She was usually
nice to me, but on that day I pinched her arm ceaselessly.
Whenever she tried to take a bite, I tapped her right elbow
and ran away. In a fit of anger, she finally threw her spoon
in my direction, and it smacked me right on the forehead. I
was frightened and cried out for Grandmother. My grandmother was startled by my scream, and by the time she entered the room, a big bump had already swelled up on my
forehead. My sister seized with fear, grabbed niy hand, and
both of us flew outside. I was happy, no matter the bump
on my head; I had won.

While we walked, she pouted. "I don't feel like going outside today. I had a bad dream: you ran away like Mom did.
You didn't turn around even though I shouted to stop you."

Maybe she thought the dream meant something would
happen to us. Maybe she intuitively felt that that day might
change our lives.

As always, we went to the hills, where we liked to play,
but my sister was much stricter than usual; she wouldn't let
me out of her sight. Squatting, she watched me idly as I
played, rolling on the ground and stomping on leaves. Eventually I dragged her to the valley. The water was cold, but I
didn't care. I tried to take off my clothes to swim. She pulled
my arms and warned me, her eyes glaring, "No. Swimming
season is over. From today, we're not going to swim until
next summer."

We sat in silence. "Didn't you hear something from
over there?" she asked, repeatedly.

I grew bored because she wouldn't play at all; she insisted
on keeping a sharp lookout. Nothing happened-her worrying seemed useless-and on the way hone I muttered to her, "You are weird today. You screwed up everything. It's
the most boring day I've ever had."

Still she looked around and spoke under her breath.
"No, Jia. I'm serious. I swear with my ten fingers. I heard
something around us several times."

The days were growing shorter. By the time we arrived
at the house, it was already dark, but it wasn't any different
from an ordinary night. My sister didn't seem relieved until we finished dinner and played our favorite word game,
where you link the last syllable of one word to a new word.
Grandmother was always on my side; otherwise, there was
no way to beat my sister. She grumbled about Grandmother's help and tried to get Grandfather on her team.

Just as we were tiring of the game, a low sound came
through the door. Only my sister heard it. She swiftly
glanced toward the door and gave Grandfather a scared
look. "Did you hear, Grandpa?"

He turned to my sister. "What? Did you hear something? "

A moment later, the sound reached our ears clearly. We
looked toward the door all at once. Nobody stopped by
our house at that time of night. In fact, we never had any
visitors at all.

"Who is it?" Grandmother asked Grandfather in a low
voice, a startled look in her eyes. I tried to stand up, but my
sister pressed me down.

The sound came again. Grandfather turned toward the
door. "Who is it?"

"Can I come in? Please..." A man's voice, beyond the
door.

We watched each other's faces. I said to Grandfather,
"Open the door. It's cold out."

He hesitated for a moment and then opened the door
cautiously.

There was a man standing in the doorway. He wore an
army uniform.

"Do you have something to eat?"

His skinny face was darkly stained, as though he washed
with soot. He clasped his hands in front of his stomach, as
if to show he meant no harm. If we were frightened of a
stranger's unexpected visit, he seemed even more frightened by the encounter.

"We don't have any food that would satisfy you."

"It's okay. I can eat anything. I haven't eaten for two
days."

With that, Grandfather let him in. He looked around
the room restlessly before sitting down right in front of the
door. My sister stepped behind her and stuck to the wall,
dragging me next to her. She held my hand tightly.

Grandfather said to Grandmother, "Bring some food he
can eat." She looked at him with suspicious eyes and slid
into the kitchen without a word.

"Thank you," the man said. I remember thinking he
had a funny way of speaking. I tried to get a closer look at
him, but my sister warned me, giving me sharp pinches.

"I've become lost." He took off his hat and pointed a
finger at us. "I followed those kids all day. Otherwise, I
would have wandered around the mountains for one more
night."

My sister opened her eyes wide and looked at me to let
me know that she had been right about hearing noises during the day.

The man gave us a smile, and I smiled back at him. He
didn't look like a bad guy.

Grandfather told us to offer our seats. That was the
warmest place in the room, where my sister and I always
sit. We moved next to Grandfather, and I finally got out of
my sister's grip. Grandmother opened the kitchen door and
asked Grandfather, "Do you want me to heat up the fireplace?"

The stranger shook both his hands to stop my grandmother. "No. It's warm enough. You don't have to...I
mean it. This is already heaven to me. Sorry to give you
such trouble."

A little later, Grandmother set the table. I stood up nimbly and took the dishes from her hands, asking the soldier
with a smile, "Do you want some plain water or scorched
rice water? I recommend my grandmother's scorched rice
water-it's really good." I didn't care about my sister anymore, and I dodged her gaze.

"Thank you. Either one is fine," he said, smiling, showing his white and well-arranged teeth.

I brought him some fairly hot scorched rice water.
Grandmother always made it, boiling the leftover cooked
rice, stuck in the pot, in water for a long time over a low
fire. We sipped it before or after our actual meal because it
made our stomachs warm and full. It was too hot to drink in
one stretch, and sometimes I burned my tongue. I couldn't
understand how my grandparents could drink something so
hot and then say, in a satisfied voice, "Hu! How cool it is!"

When I asked them how they could refer to such a hot
drink as cool, they tried to explain. "Even though it's hot,
when it goes down along your throat and arrives at your
stomach, you can feel it make your insides so clean and
cool." Seeing my dissatisfaction, they would grin and say,
"You'll understand when you grow up."

The soldier sat at the table and wolfed down his food
as we all looked on quietly. He said, "I'm taking a guerilla
training course that is supposed to last for three months.
It's my first time in these mountains-we just arrived here
five days ago. When I was doing an individual exercise, I
got lost."

While the man spoke, Grandfather rolled a cigarette
with thin paper he brought from the mines. "There is an
army training camp," Grandfather replied. "I know where
it is. Crossing the mine is a shortcut to get there. I'll take
you over there." He put the cigarette on the table for the
stranger and made another for himself.

"Thanks. It was lucky to run into those kids. I was
thinking of asking for help as soon as I saw them, but I was
afraid they might be scared. So I followed them and was
hesitating at the door."

Grandfather looked at him closely. "Are you a professional soldier? You look a little old to be going through
guerilla training for the first time."

Putting the spoon and chopsticks down on the table, he
nodded slightly to my grandmother as a token of gratitude.
He watched all of us and cautiously answered, "No. I'm
not. I was a fisherman. Actually, I'm from South Korea."