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Oh, Min-ho.
I stood frozen listening to this, with my basket at my feet and mothers
with children jostling past me.
From her cell, my mother could hear my brother’s cries and howls as he
was thrashed. She hoped he’d confess immediately but he didn’t. Minute
after minute it went on. She couldn’t bear it. She banged on the iron door of
her cell as hard as she could and yelled that she would tell them what they
wanted to know. She confessed straight away to the small white sack and
told them where it was hidden.
The amount of money took the soldiers by surprise. They called in a
senior army commander. He said he had never seen so large a sum coming
across the border. He thought it was a fund sent by South Korean spies, and
that I might be an agent of the South Korean intelligence service, the
Angibu. That was when they made Min-ho call me. When they heard my
voice, they exchanged glances. The fact I no longer spoke with a North
Korean accent was not a good sign. It increased their suspicion that I was a
South Korean agent.
When the call came from the senior army commander, of course I had no
idea what was happening. It was just as well, because my responses and my
relaxed manner convinced him that I had acted privately and had just
wanted to send some items and cash to my family. The army officers then
presented my mother and Min-ho with a deal. Under normal circumstances,
they said, the two of them should go to a prison camp. However, if they
agreed to say nothing, they would be released. They agreed. The officers
then gave the hairdryer and some of the vitamins to my mother, leaving her
a few in each bottle, and stole everything else, including all the cash, my
hard-earned savings.
Months had now gone by since Ok-hee and I had last heard from the broker
who was meant to be preparing documentation for our supposedly ‘lost’
South Korean passports. With the alarming events in Hyesan, and the
continuing delay, we became more and more nervous. What happened next
convinced me that our fortunes were flowing in a very bad direction.
In a brief and urgent call my mother told me that she and Min-ho were
departing Hyesan immediately to stay with Aunt Pretty in Hamhung. She
would not be able to contact me again for some time.
Just days after she and Min-ho had been released by the army,
Pyongyang had ordered one of its periodic crackdowns against corruption
and capitalism. A team of Bowibu special investigators had arrived in the
city. The neighbours knew that my mother had been in some kind of
trouble. They had seen armed troops at her house. They denounced her and
she was ordered to appear at the Bowibu headquarters in Hyesan, where she
was told to wait, and waited for hours. She knew that people who entered
that place sometimes did not come out. She asked to use the bathroom.
Then she locked the door, climbed out through a tiny window, jumped over
a wall, and ran down the street. The situation had become too serious even
for my mother to solve with her usual bribes and persuasion. But she also
knew how it went with these campaigns from Pyongyang – if you made
yourself scarce while the investigation was on, you could usually return
quietly when it had all blown over, without consequences. She closed up the
house, and called to tell me she was leaving.
That settled it. Everything seemed dogged by such ill fortune that I
became afraid. Using fake documents to obtain South Korean passports
now seemed like the worst idea I’d ever had. It would most surely end in
catastrophe, with Ok-hee and me being repatriated to North Korea. Ok-hee
agreed.
We called the broker and cancelled the arrangement.
It was three months before my mother felt it safe to return to Hyesan. She
took the precaution of presenting a new Chinese refrigerator and a large
sum of cash to the head of the investigation team in order to have her name
removed from the list of suspects, and went back to her house. The next-
door neighbours who’d denounced her stared at her as if they’d seen a
ghost. She had to greet these upstanding citizens and smile as if everything
had been a harmless misunderstanding. ‘The rumour was that you’d been
deported to a prison camp,’ they said. They had expected government
officials to come any day to take possession of her house. Once she was
inside and had closed the front door she sank to the floor. She realized she’d
soon have to move again, to a new neighbourhood.
Chapter 35
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