Jia: A Novel of North Korea Read online

  My grandmother was an obedient student and daughter, but she secretly supported independence activists, providing food for them and helping to write and distribute pain- phlets. When my grandfather's guerilla group stayed in the vicinity of my grandmother's town, the underground student association my grandmother belonged to helped them maintain their cover. She was the chief editor of the association at that time. My grandfather and grandmother had never even spoken privately before their marriage. They met only as comrades, with others around.

  During these times, a horrible rumor spread through the village. People said the Japanese soldiers were dragging young, single women to the battlefield and using them as whores to console solders tired from battle.

  The rumor that the women in my grandmother's village would be targeted threw the village into chaos. Some families with adult daughters believed the Japanese soldiers would never do such a thing; others hurried to find single men willing to marry their girls. My grandfather went directly to my grandmother's house and told her parents that he was taking her with his group when they left town. My grandmother's parents objected strongly; they knew my grandfather's life was dangerous-his life itself was in constant danger. My grandmother overheard the conversation, packed her belongings, and left her house with my grandfather without turning back. They were married before his comrades in the mountains and honeymooned in a cave.

  From then on, hard times were their lot. World War II only made conditions worse. Just as the rumors predicted, women were dragged away by the Japanese Army. The Japanese killed anyone they even suspected of being against them. My grandfather's group had to move every day, hiding in the mountains. Moving so often caused my grandmother to lose an unborn child five months into pregnancy and undergo another two consecutive natural abortions. When they finally delivered my father, their only child, in 1943, my grandmother wept for days. Though she was happy to have given birth, she couldn't help but be afraid for my father. When the Japanese were defeated in 1945, she expressed her relief for him by saying, "He can get a regular education, in a normal school."

  My grandparents and my father were living in Anshan, then a small city in northeast China, when the Japanese began trickling out of northeast China and Korea. At first, my grandmother resisted the long journey to China because my father was sick, but my grandfather was unhappy about changes in the Korean Peninsula: the Korean fight against Japan had turned into an ideological fight between Korean people, communists in the north and nationalists in the south. Foreign influence in the Korean Peninsula shifted from Japan to the Soviet Union and United States. There were conflicts, arguments, and betrayals among ideologues everywhere in China and Korea. Choosing a side affected people's lives so profoundly that some were found dead the day after switching from one side to the other. Nobody knew who was right, who was wrong.

  Five years later, when the Korean War began in 1950, my grandparents were still in northeast China. They feared for their relatives and decided to bring them across the border. When my grandfather returned to Korea to find them, however, he was arrested by the South Korean Army. Despite his insistence that he had no ideological position, his history and his hot temper persuaded his South Korean captors to suspect he was with the North. He was sent to Geoje Island, off the southern coast of South Korea, and held there for several years. My grandmother took my father back to North Korea and found her parents. She looked for her husband but was told he had never arrived. Several years later, when the war ended, the two Koreas exchanged captives, and my grandfather and grandmother reunited in North Korea.

  When prisoners of war came back to North Korea, most were welcomed ardently as heroes to the country. But my grandfather's history and lack of ideology were not appreciated by the North Koreans. What is worse, the North Korean government became suspicious of people who had been held in South Korean prisons. Though most of the prisoners were communists, their time in the South made their commitment appear dubious, and they were gradually excluded from important positions.

  In spite of my grandfather's revolutionary activities for Korean independence, his life after the war was miserable. He received no compensation for his years in prison, and instead was placed under constant government supervision. Inside the house, he was a hero, but outside he was powerless and considered a possible reactionary element. My father grew up seeing it all, and he became cynical. He was a big man, and energetic, like his father; always the best soccer player, and at the top of his math class. He loved science and reading, but his family background limited and embittered him. While my mother was satisfied with her station in life, having realized her dreams of becoming a dancer, my father recognized that he would never get what he wanted.

  My father's talent for science brought him to despair. Although he scored the highest in his school on the university entrance examination, he could not get into the university of his choice. Every year, a set number of students from each province can enter university, and each university decides how many students it will accept from each province, distributing admission tickets to the schools in the province. In my father's year, his school was awarded five tickets from the university where he wanted to study. The examination scores didn't matter much: acceptance hinged on family background. Despite receiving a lower score, my father's competitor in soccer and mathematics since elementary school easily got in, while my father was rejected. He was not a chosen person in his world.

  My father's teacher intervened on his behalf, and after negotiations with the Education Bureau, a small college admitted my father on the condition that he would start teaching there as soon as he graduated. My mother's mother, who didn't like my father much, worked in that college. On the school stage, she held him up as an example of the generosity of the country toward reactionary elements, but he failed to demonstrate his appreciation to the audience, which had expected a touching speech from him.

  His mind was made for science. He studied and he conducted his research, becoming the youngest teacher in the college. It was then that he met my mother. They ran into each other in the corridor on the way to his laboratory. She had just found out when her next dancing performance at the Grand Theater would be and was stopping by the school to tell her mother.

  On seeing my father, my mother approached him and asked, "What do you do here?"

  "I've heard I'm regarded as a teacher," he replied curtly.

  That night, my mom asked my grandmother to bring all the faculty members to her performance; her intention, of course, was to invite my father. After the performance, they began dating. I don't know how they came to love each other or what they talked about, but Grandmother said my father changed: he smiled more.

  When my mother's parents discovered the relationship, they almost killed my father. Such an unbalanced love affair was a slap in their faces. My father lost his job right away and was to be sent to an isolated village to teach in a small school. If my mother had given up my father, I wouldn't be in this world, but she quit everything, including eating.

  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 th
e 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.

  A Stranger's Visit

  ---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 th
inking 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."