|
PART TWO
To the Heart of the Dragon
Chapter 19
A visit to Mr Ahn
The door opened, casting a wedge of yellow light across the frozen ground.
‘Good evening, Mr Ahn,’ I said, bowing my head.
Mr Ahn’s tall figure filled the doorway. He frowned. It took him a
moment to recognize me.
‘Hello there.’ He was most surprised. ‘Min-young, isn’t it?’
My teeth were chattering now, and I was regretting my fashionable new
shoes. My toes were already swollen and numb. He invited me in. He was a
large man with a few strands of hair ribbed across the top of a bald head,
and enormous bulging eyes. A face like a jolly fat fish, was Min-ho’s joke.
My mother knew him through connections of my father’s among the border
guards. They said he was the nicest and the most trustworthy of the Chinese
traders. I much preferred him to Mr Chang, his grouchy next-door
neighbour, my mother’s other occasional business partner.
The interior of Mr Ahn’s house was warm and inviting. He and his wife
lived with their daughter, who was my age, and their son, who was Min-
ho’s age. They were Korean-Chinese, and their accent more sing-song than
mine. Seeing them together around the low table on the floor, I knew this
was a close-knit, loving family. Mrs Ahn was very small and slight
compared with her husband, with quick, nervous movements, like a bird’s.
After she had given me hot tea and they’d asked about Min-ho, whom they
liked very much, they looked at me expectantly. What on earth was I doing
here?
I explained that I wanted to visit my relatives in Shenyang for a few days.
‘I was wondering if I could spend the night … and if you could help me
get there tomorrow. I don’t have any money. My relatives will pay you
back.’ I lowered my eyes. I had not thought this through. It had been years
since I’d seen my relatives from Shenyang. I felt my face redden. ‘Or if
they don’t, my mother will, when I get back.’
Mr Ahn frowned again and scratched the back of his neck. He must have
known then that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. After a while he
said: ‘Do you know how far it is to Shenyang?’
I had only the vaguest notion of this city. I thought it was nearby, maybe
an hour away on the bus.
‘It’s an eight-hour journey,’ he said, watching his words sink in. ‘And the
bus is dangerous because you don’t have ID and you don’t speak Mandarin.
There’s a police checkpoint along the way.’
This was another serious matter I had not fully considered – the
possibility of getting caught. Any North Koreans found illegally in China
were handed over to the Bowibu.
‘It’s all right.’ The stricken look on my face amused him. ‘I can take you,
if you really want to go. But we’ll have to get there in a taxi.’
I realize now what an extraordinary imposition I was making on him and
what a kindness he was doing me. I thanked him, but he held up his palm.
He’d been trading with my mother for years, he said. He valued her custom
and trusted her.
In the morning, after we’d eaten breakfast, Mrs Ahn began cooking a huge
pot of nooroongji. This is the rice at the bottom of the pot that gets a little
burned and is crisp on the outside.
‘I make this for the North Korean visitors,’ she said. ‘They stop by here
at night. Some of them we know. Others are strangers. It happens all the
time. If I make this, it’s easy just to add some water and heat it up.’
She told me about two strangers who had knocked on the door a year
ago. They were emaciated and very weak. They ate a whole potful, enough
for twenty people. ‘It was awful to watch. They were like wild animals
afraid the food would be taken from them. I knew they were eating too
quickly. They had to rush outside and puke it all up.’
I could see that the Ahns were not rich. Their home was not like the ones
I had seen in the Chinese TV dramas. They had no servants, or a
microwave, or a bathroom with gold taps. In fact, it wasn’t as nice as our
house. But they had plenty of food.
That morning, Mr Ahn showed me Changbai. It felt most odd to be
walking among buildings I’d been seeing all my life from the other side of
the river, as if I’d passed through a mirror. It was a small town, with
pharmacies, window displays filled with ladies’ shoes of many styles;
cosmetics shops, and food everywhere – in cheap canteens, in
supermarkets; in colourful packages displayed in kiosks; in the hands of
school kids with spiky hair, eating in the street.
Mr Ahn gave me cash to buy some warm winter half-boots and a light-
green Chinese-style padded winter coat. These would make me look more
Chinese. I had already cut my hair in the style that was fashionable then for
girls in China – like men’s, long at the front and short at the back.
The next morning we set off as the sky was lightening. Mr Ahn sat next
to me in the back of a new taxi car. This in itself was a thrill. I had seldom
been in a civilian car. This one had a sound system for the radio. The road
ran for a short distance along the river, the border itself. I could not take my
eyes from the view of Hyesan. It had snowed heavily overnight, giving the
houses domed roofs, like white mushrooms. I could see the Victorious
Battle of Pochonbo Memorial in the park, its statues wearing wigs of ice,
and my elementary school. The city seemed lost in time. Every building
was weathered and grey. Only the snow-clad mountains in the background
looked new – brilliant against the neon-blue tint of the dawn.
Two North Korean guards in long coats were patrolling the path along the
far bank, watching the women, padded and muffled against the cold, who
had climbed down to the river and made holes in the ice to fill their pails.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: | 
