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Bowibu. This was the secret police. The translation doesn’t convey the
power the word Bowibu has to send a chill through a North Korean. Its very
mention, as the poet Jang Jin-sung put it, was enough to silence a crying
child.
The Bowibu didn’t watch from street corners or parked cars, or eavesdrop
on conversations through walls. They didn’t need to. The citizenry did all
that for them. Neighbours could be relied upon to inform on neighbours;
children to spy on children; workers to watch co-workers; and the head of
the neighbourhood people’s unit, the banjang, maintained an organized
system of surveillance on every family in her unit. If the authorities asked
her to place a particular family under closer watch, she would make the
family’s neighbours complicit. Informers often received extra food rations
for their work. The Bowibu weren’t interested in the real crimes that
affected people, such as theft, which was rife, or corruption, but only in
political disloyalty, the faintest hint of which, real or imagined, was enough
to make an entire family – grandparents, parents and children – disappear.
Their house would be roped off; they’d be taken away in a truck at night,
and not seen again.
I never noticed my parents’ silence on the subjects we were taught. This
would only take on significance for me years later. Neither did I ever
question their loyalty or doubt that they believed the selfless and
superhuman feats of Kim Il-sung in saving our nation.
During a summer vacation from kindergarten, my mother took me on a visit
to our family in Hyesan. That trip is memorable because I heard another
myth that was to shape my childish idea of the world. It was told to me by
Uncle Opium, the drug dealer, at the house of my grandmother.
Opium wasn’t hard to come by in North Korea. Farmers had been
cultivating poppies since the 1970s, with state laboratories refining the raw
produce into high-quality heroin – one of the few products the country
made to an international standard. It was sold abroad to raise foreign
currency. North Koreans, however, were forbidden to use it or trade with it.
But in such a bribe-dependent economy, plenty of it found its way into the
general population. My uncle was selling it illegally in Hyesan and over the
river in China, where there was a strong demand. My grandmother used it
regularly. Many people did – painkillers and pharmaceutical medicines
were often hard to come by.
Uncle Opium had enormous shining eyes, much larger than any of my
mother’s other siblings. It was years before the penny dropped and I
realized why his eyes looked like this. He told me a lady came down from
the sky every time it rained.
‘She is dressed in black,’ he said mysteriously, sucking on a cigarette of
rough tobacco and blowing a ring of yellow smoke. ‘If you grab hold of her
skirts she’ll take you up there with her.’
Back in Anju I waited days for it to rain. When finally I heard thunder I
ran out of the house and looked up at the clouds. The raindrops splashed on
my face. If the Respected Father Leader Kim Il-sung could appear in the
east and in the west at the same time, it seemed quite reasonable to me that
there would be a lady in black who flew among the clouds. I began to
picture her realm up there in the sky. The thought of this lady scared the
wits out of me, but I was too curious not to look for her. I held on to the
steps in case she came down as fast as the rain and snatched me.
My mother quickly ruined the magic.
‘What are you doing?’ she yelled from the front door. ‘Get in here.’
‘I’m waiting for the lady in black.’
‘What?’
Then her expression changed, as if she were remembering something.
She clearly had some recollection of this story from Uncle Opium, and then
realized I’d completely fallen for it. Suddenly she was laughing so hard she
was bent over with her arms wrapped around herself. Then she hugged me
and I could feel her body shaking. She was still laughing hours later when
my father came home and she was cooking the rice for dinner, dabbing her
eyes with her sleeve.
Now I was confused.
Some magical stories I was supposed to believe in with all my heart and
could never doubt. Others I believed in at a cost to my dignity. I had really
wanted to believe in the lady in black.
The world inside the kindergarten was clear. The teachers had simple
answers for everything good and everything bad. Outside the kindergarten,
the world was more confusing. Uncle Opium could probably have
explained it to me, if I’d ever been able to have a normal conversation with
him.
At his house once I saw a solid gold bar on the table, and next to it a
gluey lump that looked like tar. I asked him what it was and he told me it
was opium.
‘Stick the end of your pencil in and take a bit,’ he said.
‘What do I do with it?’
He gave a breathy, hissing laugh. ‘Eat it, of course.’
I had a cold at the time and wasn’t feeling too good. The symptoms
disappeared within minutes.
Anju may have been grimy and bleak but the hills surrounding it were
beautiful. I enjoyed three idyllic childhood summers there, picnicking in
fields of wild flowers. In certain months of the year the air would be
buzzing with dragonflies. They hovered and flashed in iridescent blues and
greens. We would chase them, running through the long grass. All the kids
did this. At the weekend, my father would join in. Some kids bit off the
heads and ate them, saying they tasted nutty.
On one outing we laid out our picnic mat in a copse of tall pine trees. My
mother started hitting the trees with a long branch and suddenly it was
raining pine cones. I ran around gathering them in a sack. We had never
laughed so much together.
That scene is vivid in my mind as a moment of pure happiness just before
a painful personal tragedy for me. We arrived home to find that my little
dog had been killed. One of the trucks at the military base had run her over.
I cried so much. My father told me there would not be another pet dog.
They were too hard to obtain.
But it wasn’t that event that overshadowed my memories of Anju. There
was far worse to come.
Chapter 5
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