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Why is he whispering? I called him straight back. He answered before the
phone had rung once.
‘I’m in Phonthong Prison.’
Chapter 50
Long wait for freedom
My apartment seemed to go into a spin around me. I was clutching the
phone so tight my nails dug into my palm.
‘What?’
‘It’s where they put foreigners,’ Min-ho said. ‘It’s much bigger than the
prison in Luang Namtha …’
I was in that nightmare again, pitched straight back into the darkness. My
lip began to wobble. But my kid brother was sounding imperturbable. It
was as if he were describing a new school he’d started.
‘There are white people here, and black people, everyone except locals
…’
‘Whose phone is this?’
‘My Chinese friend here in the cell,’ he whispered. ‘It’s against the rules
to have them.’
My head fell into my hand. ‘Why, why, why aren’t you in the South
Korean embassy? They told me they’d get you the next day.’
‘The embassy? I’ve seen no one from there …’
Min-ho explained that after I left the immigration office, the officials
took him, my mother and the others to the cells on the ground floor. So they
were in those mouldy concrete cells at the end of that corridor. A few days
later they were taken to Phonthong Prison. My mother was there too, in the
women’s section. Min-ho hadn’t seen the sun for weeks, he said, and his
skin had gone very white. Yet he sounded cheerful. I marvelled at his ability
to endure any physical discomfort or hardship. I realized then that it would
be the pressures of the rich world he’d have trouble coping with.
‘There are two South Koreans here. One’s doing five years for selling
amphetamines. The other had some sort of business disagreement in Laos.
When they found out we were from the North they bought food from
outside with their own money and gave it to me and sent some over to the
women’s prison for Omma and the others. They’ve been here for a long
time, but they encourage me. They’re telling me not to worry. They say a
lot of North Koreans pass through and then get sent to the South Korean
embassy. It’s the normal process, Nuna. Don’t worry. We’ll be all right.’
Min-ho and his Chinese friend were sharing a cell with two others, he
said, from Britain and from Ghana. The British man was serving a long
sentence for possessing marijuana. His name was John and he was very
kind.
‘Guess what, Nuna? I’m learning English!’
At that the floodgates opened. I cried until my eyes and nose were
streaming. Through the tears I managed to say: ‘We can speak English
together when you get here.’
Min-ho, in his characteristic way, was enjoying discovering the world,
albeit from the inside of a prison cell. Starting from the very bottom. I
admired him so much. He was not letting the prospect of months or even
years in prison cast him down. He was facing the future, preparing for the
next phase of his life.
At least now I understood why that junior diplomat had been in such haste
to drive off. He’d deliberately been untruthful about my family getting out
in a day or two. He knew the process, but didn’t want me hanging around
and getting into more trouble. Still, there was reason to hope the ordeal
would end soon, and happily. Now that I thought about it, there had never
been any suggestion, even from the Laotian immigration chief when she
was furious with me, that my mother and Min-ho might be handed over to
the North Korean embassy, or sent back to China.
My mother and Min-ho spent another two months in Phonthong Prison in
Vientiane before being handed over, as Min-ho’s friends had predicted, to
the South Korean embassy. They then spent another three months there, in
an embassy shelter where they joined the queue of North Koreans being
slowly processed for exit by the Lao government.
Finally, more than six months after I’d returned from Laos, in the late
spring of 2010, I received a call from the National Intelligence Service in
Seoul. Among the North Korean arrivals being processed, the agent told
me, was a woman claiming to be my mother, and a man claiming to be my
brother.
The release of tension in hearing those words, and the deadpan,
bureaucratic way the agent had said them, set off a fit of giggling in me, and
I couldn’t stop. I tried to apologize to him. To his credit, he said: ‘Take your
time. You must be relieved.’
They had arrived.
It was over.
Chapter 51
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