Stars Between the Sun and Moon (19 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

“What do you
plan on doing with the baby?” the prison interrogator demanded of me.

I had been back in Onsung Jipgyulso for a few days. The two other women in the interrogation room with me, one seven months pregnant like I was, the other far less along, already knew their babies' fates: abortion.

I closed my eyes tight. I felt like the tiger that wished a rope would fall from the sky and take him away. I didn't want to be the sun or the moon, just the stars in between.

“I've made arrangements,” I said finally, making it up as I went. “I've made arrangements for the child to be given away after it's born.”

Silence filled the room. I thought the interrogator was going to reach out and slap me. But I held my head high. If my child was going to die, I was going to die with it. That much I did know.

“You two,” the interrogator yelled at the other women, “out that door.” He pointed to a back exit. “You,” he barked at me. “Back to your cell.”

The cell was
empty except for two elderly women and a teenager with the bottom half of her leg missing. I stood by the window and stared out over the barren field. It was a chilly day, the clouds heavy and black. The window was cracked allowing the wind to howl through it.

A shiver ran through me as I felt you, my baby, kick.

I wrapped my arms around my stomach. At that moment, a light snow began to fall. But instead of feeling cold, I felt heat. Taebum, for the first time in a long time, I felt heat move through me.

“Jjanghago haeddulnal Doraondanda
 . . . 
”
I sang softly. “A bright sunny day is to come back.”

I didn't move from my position until the other inmates had shuffled in from work. The cell was bursting with prisoners. There were twice as many as when I had first been here. We were boxed in, bumping elbows as we drank our evening soup of mushy corn. China had been cracking down on us, since there were so many women leaving Chosun.

“You may have a lucky day coming,” the woman on the other side chimed.

I didn't even know the year, let alone the date, I realized. “Why?” I asked.

“Because I've heard that a group called the United Nations has ordered Chosun to stop killing the babies of inmates. It's putting pressure on the Party to release pregnant women, children and the old.” My eyes rested on the elderly women in the cell who were coughing and wheezing. They could not eat their soup. Many inmates were sick with diarrhea.

Nothing changed right away. Over the next two weeks, several women died. I cared for the infirm as best I could. When the workers went out in the mornings, I would stroke the heads of the sick, holding their hands when they moaned, their bodies writhing in pain. I used sanitary pads cleaned with soap and cold water as cold compresses for their foreheads when they had fever. In exchange, I took the soup that the sick women were unable to eat. I could feel my baby growing stronger.

On a day in mid-summer an interrogator informed me stiffly that I would be moved to the collection centre near my family's house. I didn't have time to think about whether this was a positive omen because I came down with the intestinal illness so many other prisoners had. I woke in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, pain gripping my body. “She's having the baby,” a prisoner screamed at the guard pacing back and forth.

“Wake three other inmates and hold her down,” he shouted. Four women each took a part of my body, two my legs, the other two my arms. But my water never broke.

“She's not giving birth,” one prisoner said. “She's got the sickness.”

The pain got worse. I spent hours crouching over the hole in the ground we used for a toilet, but nothing came. I finally made a request of one of my prison mates, who had been detained for a petty crime. She was assigned to prepare our food and so was allowed to leave the prison during the day to get supplies. I handed her one of my pairs of pants. I had been given them by another prisoner when she was released. “Try and get five hundred won for these. Then, with the money, buy me some pills to make me well.”

Late the next day, the woman slipped me ten pills.

I took three a day, and within a few days I started to regain my strength. I felt the baby kicking again. I was recovering.

A few nights
later, I dreamed of the tunnel of poplar trees again. This time I was farther along the tunnel. The light that was drawing me toward it was brighter. When I woke, though my legs wobbled and I thought I would faint from the rush of blood to my head, I was able to walk. I managed to stay upright as a guard led me to the interrogation room. He directed me to sign some papers, and then he said I could go home.

I felt so faint when the sun hit my eyes, I had to lean against a wall. But I eventually managed, without help, to make it to the front gate. A guard opened it for me, and I walked out and into my mother's arms. She draped a coat around my shoulders and let me lean on her as we moved down the streets.

“Why did they release me?” I asked her once we were on the train.

“I don't know. They just told me to come and get you. The head of the local committee is coming by later. She's been put in charge of watching you. It's Mihwa's mother.”

At my parents' house, we ate an evening meal of corn rice and cucumber. My mother did what she always had, giving me much of her portion and taking little for herself. I lay back on my mat and was drifting off to sleep when my mother called for me to sit up. Mihwa's mother had arrived.

“You were released because there are too many prisoners,” Mihwa's mother explained, settling into a sitting position on the floor beside me. “You can have the baby at home but Sunhwa, I do not have good news for you. The baby will be killed after it is born.”

I clenched my fists in an attempt to contain the anger bubbling up inside of me. I knew my release was too good to be true.

“Sunhwa, a year ago you were sentenced to three years in prison. You were released after nine months on a general amnesty and on your assurance that you would not return to China. You returned, however, so after the baby is born, you will go back to prison to finish your sentence.”

“Which prison?” my mother asked. Her eyes were lost, vacant.

“Kyohwaso,” Mihwa's mother replied. My mother slumped forward, and my father stood up and started pacing the room. “I have to fulfill my duties,” the head of the committee continued. Her eyes bored into mine. “You are under watch. I will be checking in on you.”

I nodded to show I understood.

“These are the facts,” Mihwa's mother concluded. She shuffled her body right up against mine. “Do something about it,” she said so softly, I almost didn't hear.

My body stiffened. I looked at my mother, who shook her head indicating I should not ask questions.

When Mihwa's mother's footsteps had disappeared, my father and mother exchanged glances. My father went into his room, closing the door behind him.

My mother took me by the elbow. “Wash yourself, change into several pairs of pants and tops, and then go to your uncle's house in the mountains,” she said.

I gazed into her dark eyes, which were filled with tears.

“Your father and I knew what Mihwa's mother was going to say. He believes you should finish your sentence and fulfill your revolutionary duties. He doesn't want you to keep the baby. But I know now what it is like to lose a child. I know your brother Hyungchul is dead. I can feel it. Go, do whatever you want with your baby, but don't come back here with it, ever.”

When I was
a little girl, my family and I would go to my uncle's house each year at the beginning of planting season and the end of harvest season. We helped him in exchange for corn, rice and cabbage that my mother would place in the cupboard beneath the ground.

I had not been to my mother's brother's house since before I married Myungin, but I knew the way well. My mother made me ten corn pancakes to take with me. I wrapped them in a plastic bag I tied around my waist. I left as the half moon rested over the house and my father's snores filled the room. I hurried along the river path until I reached the mountains. My uncle lived a two-day walk from our home if I went by road and paths. But this time I knew I must follow no path to avoid coming face to face with security. I was terrified of encountering snakes in the long grass and bushes and I sometimes froze in my tracks, listening for the slightest sound that a reptile might be close.

Given my pregnancy, my fatigue and unrelenting hunger, I anticipated it would take me three days to make it. I would have to live on the pancakes and whatever herbs and weeds I could find. I could drink water from the streams.

I passed a few farmers along the way, but by and large I saw no one. I slept for a few hours each day under the trees. On day three, it rained heavily, soaking my clothes and hair and weighing me down even more.

I had to climb one final mountain before descending into the valley that would lead me to my uncle's house. I was suffering from chill. I wanted to curl into a ball and sleep, but I knew I had to keep moving. If I rested now, I would never wake up.

Out of breath, I reached the top and began my descent. I could see seven curves on the way down the mountain. The stream that started as a trickle at the top had become a small waterfall by the time I reached the third curve just before the turn in the path. As I continued, I could hear the water gaining force, crashing against rocks and the riverbank.

By the fourth curve, the stream had turned into a river with rapids. As I started to cross the log that had been stretched over the river as a bridge for villagers, I slipped and fell to a sitting position. The waves splashed high, soaking my body and face. I managed to take off my slippers and tuck them into the waist of my pants. Then, as best I could, I gripped the log with my knees and inched my way across. When my hands met the thick moss on the other side, I pulled myself up on shore and rolled onto my back.

I looked up at the trees, the sun streaming down in between the leaves, listening as my heartbeat slowed. My eyes closed, and I saw the boulevard of poplar trees from my dream and the bright light at the end, beaming down on me. I had no idea what tomorrow held, but I felt I was moving toward somewhere I was meant to be.

The rains had been so heavy that the valley I had to traverse had flooded. The tops of trees poked up from the water. For as far as I could see, a lake stretched before me.

I had heard that pregnant women float well, and I held tight to this belief as I waded in. For as long as the water remained shallow, there were small shrubs I could reach and hold onto. When I felt the bottom slant beneath me and the water deepen, I grasped the branches of a submerged tree. The ground dipped again, the water now coming up to my chin.

“I must stay alive,” I repeated, first softly and then in a scream. As the water rose to reach my lips, I ground my teeth. “You will stay alive if you stay calm,” I told myself.

Finally I made it safely to the other side. I had no energy left, but I knew I had to find refuge for the night. I pulled off my wet clothes and wrung out the water as best I could with my numb hands and swollen joints. Then I forced my sluggish feet to move, one step after the other, toward a village I could see in between two hills.

At the first door I knocked on, a man answered and spat at me. “Go away,” he shouted before slamming the door in my face.

A candle was lit in the front window of the second house. A woman with a ruddy complexion and clear, sparkling eyes opened the door. I thought she was about to invite me in, but instead she too screamed at me: “We don't want people from China here!”

I begged her to stop yelling. “Do you think that in my condition,” I asked when she had quieted down, “I would be going back and forth to China?”

The woman's eyes moved to my stomach. “I'm due any day now,” I continued. “I am going to my uncle's house to give birth. I will sleep anywhere and be gone as soon as the sun rises.”

The woman didn't give me a mat or any food. I ate the last of my pancakes and closed my eyes, lying in the midst of her family's outdoor shoes. I left as soon as I heard the sparrows singing the next morning.

Chapter Thirty-two

My uncle Heejoon
was not home when I arrived that afternoon at the three-room house he shared with two other families. His wife gasped in horror when she saw me. But once she got over the shock, she invited me in and served me what food she could, a bowl of corn rice and kimchi. The family was so poor and the house was so cramped that when Heejoon, his four children, his wife and I put down our mats for the night, we were shoulder to shoulder, much as the inmates had been in prison.

Heejoon sold most of the rice he farmed for nongtaegi. He left first thing in the morning and rarely returned until past midnight. His wife and children survived on a bowl of rice a day and some cabbage or turnip. Now they had me to feed, too. As I grew more and more faint from hunger, barely able some days to roll up my bedding, Heejoon's two eldest daughters sometimes left in the middle of the night to steal food from nearby farms. They would wrap a stalk of corn or a zucchini in the bottom of their shirts and wake me when they got back. I would eat it quietly and quickly, so that Heejoon, his alcoholic snores filling the room, wouldn't wake up and demand the food for himself.

The extra food gave me some energy, and I helped around the house by tending the fires. The kitchen was about a metre lower than the main room. My walk was now a waddle. The baby was so low, sitting in my stomach like a weighted ball, that I felt it would come at any time. But I went days and then weeks past what I had thought was my due date.

Then, one morning, I woke to shooting pain down my left side and across my abdomen. I rolled on the floor, wailing, my limbs tense. Heejoon's daughters leapt up and gathered towels. They prepared to hold me down, but my uncle didn't want them to. “Get out,” he ordered me. “There is no room in here for you to give birth.” He pulled me by the hands, trying to drag me to the door. My aunt shouted at him to stop and left to find a midwife.

One of my cousins ran outside and laid a coat on the grass. I hobbled my way toward it with my other cousin's help. My aunt returned with two women, one of whom took hold of my legs, the other my arms. But it wasn't necessary. Once I was in the birthing position, the baby came in one big push.

I was elated, sweat pouring off my skin. I waited as the women washed the baby in some well water and cut the umbilical cord with a knife. Then my aunt wrapped the baby in a towel from the house. “It's a boy,” she said, placing him on my chest.

My heart sank. I had wanted a girl. I sobbed, not from joy but from defeat.

I couldn't look at the baby at first. But when I finally opened the towel and gazed into his black eyes, warmth engulfed me. I felt a determination rise underneath that warmth, a commitment. As the day unfolded and we lay there together on a blanket of pine needles, Taebum, my son, I vowed that you and I would never be separated.

I remained in
Heejoon's home for a month. There were no clothes for the baby. His diapers were towels that had previously been used to clean dishes and wipe the floor. Anytime he cried, I headed outside, even in the rain. I paced back and forth in between the trees trying to calm him, far away from where anyone could hear him. I didn't want to disturb Heejoon, who was angry that I was there. I took up space and food. He also didn't like it that the baby's father was an ethnic Korean.

I begged my uncle to help me cross the river. “Find someone to marry me off. You can keep all the money, but just get me to China,” I pleaded. I was desperate to leave Chosun before anyone from the Party found me and the baby, still alive.

But my uncle didn't know anyone to ask so I had no choice. After a few weeks, I left for my parents' house, travelling back across the flooded valley and the rushing mountain stream with the baby tied onto my back. I was so weak when I arrived that I collapsed on the floor. My mother had to lift the baby onto my stomach so he could nurse.

“I am not going to kill this baby,” I cried. My mother sat quietly beside me, her expression vacant.

“Umma,” I said, trying to get her attention. “Umma!”

“When you have lost a child, either through death or separation, it is a black stain that never leaves the mind,” my mother said slowly, as if in a dream. “Halmuni lived in death itself when she thought she had killed Hyegyung. When she got old, she always returned to the time when Hyegyung was a ghost.” After a long pause, she continued.

“I feel in my bones that Hyungchul is dead. And your brother Hyungwoo now goes back and forth into China trying to feed us all. It is only a matter of time . . . ” Her words trailed off, but I knew what she wanted to say. It was only a matter of time before Hyungwoo, too, would die in prison.

Mihwa's mother stopped by every three days to check if I had returned, my mother told me. The Party supervisor had also come to the house, demanding that my mother turn me in. So the very night I arrived, I headed to the mountains where my father was farming. Joining him was my only hope.

My father spent
most of each spring living on a plot of land on the mountain where he now grew vegetables. He had built a shed there, half of it underground. By the time I arrived, dawn was casting its end-of-summer haze. My father was boiling rice on a small stove. The baby began to cry, and for the first time since I had given birth, I did not try to quiet his wails by placing him on my breast or running into the forest. The plot of land my father was farming was located in the farthest reaches of the mountain. No one could hear us there.

My father greeted me coolly. But he pulled down an extra bowl from a small shelf and began serving me some food. As I ate, he covered the baby with a clean sheet and blanket. I slept for most of the day, waking only when the baby cried to be fed or changed. When my father returned at sunset, he gave me some baby clothes he had received in trade from the farmer tilling the land below us.

As was his way, my father said little to me for the first month I stayed with him on the mountain. He didn't order me to perform my revolutionary duties and return to prison, though, and he didn't shun the baby. Instead, he showed himself to be the man villagers so respected when he travelled in the rural areas selling machines.

“If you are hungry, eat anything you want from the farm—there are cucumbers, turnips and green onions,” he had told me on my first evening there. Whenever he went to fetch water from a stream higher up the mountain, he returned with a handful of raspberries, all of which he gave to me. I cooked rice and vegetables for us for dinner, and we passed most evenings in silence, listening to the cicadas.

My mother came
to visit in the middle of the harvest season. “I see your son being faced with a tough life,” my father said as we sat around our cooking fire. “So I have chosen a name that will give him strength. Taebum is a strong name, a big name.”

My mother, her pockets full of garbage, rocks and sticks she had collected along the way, had come to let me know a friend of Hyungchul's had agreed to take me to China.

“Something has been organized for you. It is best we do not know what. But I have been assured you will be safe,” she told me. She left the next morning, not wanting to arouse suspicion in Mihwa's mother by being away too long.

One day about a week later, my father didn't go to work. We sat outside the shed together, looking over the fields. After a while, he began to speak.

“Your mother and I are very much apart,” he said. “When you were younger, she threatened to leave me many times because of my anger. But she didn't. She knew her life would be no life without a husband. But now she is lost in that mind of hers that lives in the past, as was her own mother in her final years.

My father cleared his throat. “I don't want you to think about us anymore,” he continued after a long silence. “You go where you need to go and forget about all of us.”

I was too stunned to know how to reply.

“I've made you something,” he said. He circled around the back of the shed and emerged with a thick grey plastic bag. “The water will be too cold for the baby so when you were sleeping, I sewed this for you. I tested it in the stream several times. It will not leak. You can put Taebum in it. See?” He showed me how the bag could be tied near the baby's neck. “He can breathe if you do it this way.”

“Why?” I asked, my eyes searching his pale expressionless face. “Why are you helping me leave? I thought you didn't want me to go.”

“Hyungwoo is never home. His wife has returned with her son to her own parents' house. Your mother is dying. Your other brother is probably dead, but we'll likely never know. Your sister has her own struggles. I have not always been a great man but I want to end my time on earth by doing the right thing. I want you to give Taebum what I failed to help you provide Sungmin. You can't stay close to the border with Chosun waiting for the day you will find Sungmin again. You need to go somewhere where you will be safe.”

I bit my lip to stop myself from crying as we sat in silence for a time listening to the sounds of the world around us.

“I have received a message from a farmer in another field that it is time,” my father said eventually. “Go back to our house in the middle of the night. Your mother will take you to your brother's friend, and he will take you into China.”

I wanted to stay on the farm with my father, comforted by his scent of leaves and fresh air. But I knew I would be discovered if I didn't leave, and Taebum's life was at risk as long as we remained in Chosun. My father's parting words that night were instructions on how to place Taebum in the plastic bag so that he would not slip down and suffocate, but also so his face would not poke out enough for his cries to alert the border guards. My father cleared his throat as his goodbye, and he had returned to sleep by the time I left the hut with my infant son.

The following night,
with Hyungchul's friend Jaesung, Taebum and I began the journey I had made so often in the past. But this time, some things were different. First, I had my baby who might put us in danger by crying at any time. Also, Jaesung informed me, it was a particularly difficult time to cross.

“It's mushroom season,” he said, “and people aren't giving the mushrooms they pick to the government anymore. They are selling them in China. Party guards are cracking down hard on mushroom smugglers, doubling up their forces along the border areas. Guards go high up in the mountains to sit and watch the farmers below and when the smugglers leave the farms, the guards follow them. That's why it is necessary for you to leave now before you are discovered on the mountain with your father.”

My goodbye with my mother had been brief. I had taken her bony, cold hands in my own. “Stay alive for five years,” I begged her, squeezing her knuckles tight. “I'll find a way either to return by then or to send for you. I won't accept that this is the last time I will see you.”

I struggled to keep up with Jaesung, leaning on a stick when my feet felt heavy and pain shot up my legs and spine. The baby slept but as my breathing became more laboured, Taebum stirred. I worried we would not make it up the hill, let alone across the Tumen. But I managed, concealing my pain from Jaesung, to make it to the riverbank.

As I slipped off my shoes in the long reeds, a man came up quickly behind me. He pointed a knife at me with a shaking hand, his eyes red and wild. I stood silent as Jaesung leapt in between us, his hands in the air.

“Lower the knife,” he shouted.

The man, wearing torn pants and a dirty button-down top, thrust the knife at Jaesung's face.

“We are not border guards,” Jaesung assured him. “We will not hurt you.”

The man had a bag around his shoulders, bursting with some kind of food inside. “He's a mushroom dealer,” I whispered to Jaesung. “He's as scared of us as we are of him.”

“My wife and I are travelling to visit her relatives,” Jaesung said to the man. “We've lost our way. Please lower the knife.”

“You can't stay here,” the man said, still waving his knife in the air. “Guards are everywhere. Down there is better,” he said, jolting his head to the east. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. “The water is deeper but safer. We could go together.”

“We don't want to cross,” Jaesung lied.

“Then I will leave you,” the man said, his eyes darting up and down the riverbank. As quickly as he had descended upon us, he was gone, disappearing into the long blades of grass.

“We'll go where he said,” Jaesung ordered, motioning for me to follow him back into the forest. After several hours, when the night air was at its calmest, Jaesung said it was time to cross.

I had been nursing Taebum, watching him suckle under the light of the moon. Once he fell asleep, I placed him in the bag the way my father had shown me. I slipped my shoes off and stepped into the river. I felt the baby kick as the cool water sucked at the bottom part of the bag.

The moon was the brightest I had ever seen when crossing. The riverbanks on both sides were fully illuminated. I held my breath, making a fervent wish that Taebum would not wake in the middle of the Tumen River. I could hear Jaesung's worried breathing. He was thinking the same thing. I reached out and took Jaesung's hand, clutching it tight. As we neared the other side, I closed my eyes briefly, hoping we would not be spotted by a border patrol on the Chinese side. My wish was granted. We were pulling ourselves up onto the rocks of the riverbank when the moon slipped behind a cloud, blanketing us in darkness.