|
Party propaganda, was a pernicious foreign corruption. But this ‘love-
making’ video, as she called it, had been made in Pyongyang, for sale
abroad and for circulation among elite Party cadres. I would not have
believed it if the ‘actors’ hadn’t spoken in such familiar accents. I lost my
innocence that day. To my mind, my country did, too.
Like my other friends, when I menstruated the first time I went through
three emotions in sharp succession: shock, embarrassment and absolute
panic. I had to use my wits to figure out what to do. Incredibly, most of us
handled it, without telling anyone or asking our mothers for advice. My
mother, the most sensible woman I knew, offered me none, just as my
grandmother, I’m sure, had given her none.
It was at the height of my panic during my first menstrual cycle that one
of the girls in class told me she’d seen something that had scared her at a
public toilet near our school. She wanted to show me. We crept in there to
take a look together. The place was dripping, dim, and stinking. Next to the
hole of the squat toilet was a bloodied white plastic bag. Inside was a dead
baby with a tiny blue-pink face. The mother must have given birth there and
fled. The umbilical cord and the placenta lay next to it. I was shocked to the
core and didn’t sleep that night.
That year, 1995, I dated my first boyfriend. He was four years older than
me, and a hoodlum. His name was Tae-chul. He was tall, thin, and wore a
Japanese casual jacket, the height of sophistication in Hyesan. He had a
conceited little half-smile I found attractive. Every North Korean city has
hoodlums. These are not violent criminals, but young people with the kind
of personality that attracts followers and who often deal in banned goods.
There is quite a lot of low-level crime they can get away with, as long as
they do nothing that verges on the political and attracts the eyes of the
Bowibu.
He had money. He was also in the police academy and was training to be
a policeman. Just walking with him thrilled me because of the attention I
was getting. In fact, after he waited for me a few times outside the school
gate, the rumours started flying about us. This was quite a serious matter,
because when the word gets out that a girl has been dating, it’s not easy for
her to find another match.
I worried about this, but I liked him. I was proud that he wanted to go out
with me when so many other girls wanted him. We would go to his house to
listen to South Korean pop cassettes and play the guitar and accordion
together. Like any other boyfriend and girlfriend in North Korea of this age,
we did not even kiss. Holding hands was as far as it went. Even then we
were discreet. Our families were not aware of our romance and did not
consider it improper for me to be at his house. My mother would have had a
stroke if she’d known he was my boyfriend.
That year I found my duties with the Socialist Youth League more
oppressive than ever. In spring we had to help plant rice saplings, in the
summer we weeded and spread fertilizer, and in autumn came the harvest,
which students and workers from all over the country helped with. This
mass enterprise, in fields of flying red banners, was the epitome of
communist idealism.
In the summer we were also ordered to dig tunnels around our school.
The entire country was being mobilized, and everyone was on a war
footing. Sirens wailed almost daily, and everybody dropped what they were
doing and dashed to and fro in frenzy, practising air-raid drills in case of an
attack. America and South Korea were about to launch a nuclear strike, we
were told. War could break out at any minute. The thought of nuclear war
terrified me. My mother panicked and gave a lot of stuff away. She gave all
our spare blankets and pillows to Uncle Poor and his family on the
collective farm.
The boys dug frantically with shovels and the girls shifted the earth. I
hated every minute of this. If war started while we were at school, several
hundred students were supposed to hide in the warren of tunnels. I was
worried that our amateur engineering might prove disastrous, and bury us
alive. I was sceptical, too, of whether these tunnels were deep enough to
protect us from a nuclear strike. Years later I discovered that the propaganda
had an element of truth. The United States had actually been considering air
strikes against our country’s nuclear plants.
After one of these tedious and exhausting days of digging and air-raid
drills, I went to my friend Sun-i’s house after school. She was in the tight
bunch of friends I hung out with, but this was the first time I’d been to her
home. Usually she came to mine.
‘Shall we eat something?’ I said. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘I’m not sure what we’ve got.’ She sounded vague.
‘Anything.’
‘We don’t have much.’
This annoyed me. You’re always getting snacks at my house. ‘I don’t
need a meal,’ I said.
Sun-i hesitated. She was embarrassed.
‘Come here,’ she said, leading me into the kitchen. Four pots sat on the
stove. She slid the lid off one. ‘Look. I can’t give you this.’
Inside the pot were thick dark-green objects. She put the lid back on
before I could ask what they were, but I could tell it wasn’t normal food. On
the way home, I realized they might have been corn stalks.
Why would her mother be cooking such a thing instead of rice?
Chapter 16
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
