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And if I’m caught?
Arrest, repatriation, beatings, prison camp. The ruin of my family’s
songbun. A spasm of terror ran through me.
No matter which way I looked at it, I had no choice.
So I tried hard to convince myself. Geun-soo’s all right. A girl could do a
lot worse. If I married him I’d have a comfortable life without fear, and a
Chinese ID. I spent weeks thinking these thoughts, arguing in silence with
myself.
There was just one problem, however, and it was a major one. I wasn’t
choosing any of this. It was all happening to me.
Through connections, Geun-soo’s family obtained a new identity for me.
He even showed me the ID card and let me hold it. I recognized my face,
but not the name. It was a new name, another one I had not chosen. I was to
be a Korean-Chinese called Jang Soon-hyang. As I was too young to marry
– the legal marriage age in China is twenty – they’d made me older.
‘You’ll get it after the wedding,’ Geun-soo said with a smirk, and picked
it out of my hands. Even he could tell I was having misgivings – more so
when I learned that my new name meant ‘the person who respects elders,
and makes a good wife by following her husband and listening really well
to him’.
The millennium passed, then another birthday. My uncle gave me a
Motorola cellphone as a present, so that I could chat with Geun-soo
whenever I liked, he said. The wedding plans gathered pace.
Mrs Jang sensed that I was feeling pressured by her will. She tried to
reassure me. ‘After you’re married, we’ll take care of you,’ she said,
squeezing my hand with her bony fingers and rings. ‘You won’t have to
worry about a thing.’
It was kind of her to say that. It emboldened me to ask the question I
wanted to ask. I don’t know why I thought I had to ask her permission.
‘When I’m married would it be all right to visit my family?’
I thought my new Chinese ID would mean I could visit North Korea
legally.
We were sitting around the kitchen table at her home. Mrs Jang and
Geun-soo’s two sisters stared at me in horror.
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ she said, as if there’d been some gross
misunderstanding. ‘You can never go back. Do you understand?’ Her voice
carried an edge of warning. ‘They might find out who you are. Then we’d
all be in trouble. We’ve had to break rules to get your ID as it is. In fact, it’s
too dangerous even to contact your family again.’
She saw the shock on my face and she gave a thin, quick smile, like a
sudden crack in ice.
‘After you marry, you will have a new family. You will join our family.’
When I told Geun-soo what his mother had said, I was still emotional. He
knew how badly I wanted to see my mother and Min-ho again. I thought
this was his moment – to comfort his future wife, show understanding, tell
me we’d find a way to achieve it, somehow, and not to worry. Instead he
said blandly: ‘My mother’s right. It’s for the best.’ He wasn’t even looking
at me. He was playing a video game.
I was stunned. He and my future in-laws were closing down any talk of
my seeing my family again. If I even managed to contact them, I would
have to keep it secret from those closest to me.
I looked at Geun-soo’s face, pale in the reflected light of the video game,
and knew I could not marry this man.
Whatever happened next I would be on my own, but I didn’t care. I
would find a way to fly in life. I didn’t know how, but I would take my
chances.
My uncle and aunt were talking excitedly about the wedding at almost
every mealtime. I could not bear to tell them of my decision, or to witness
their disappointment. I was fearful, too, that Mrs Jang might feel so angry
and humiliated by the loss of face that she would report me to the
authorities as a fugitive. I had no one to talk to. The situation left only one
door open.
Escape.
It was the summer of 2000. The wedding was just weeks away. I thought
hard about when I would make my move. It was a phone call from Geun-
soo that decided the matter for me. He told me that his mother, without
asking us, had booked our honeymoon at a luxurious beach resort at Sanya,
on the South China Sea.
That did it. I would leave straight away.
I threw some clothes into a bag, and waited until my aunt and uncle had
left for work. I took the elevator down to the lobby and smiled at the
caretaker. The blood was rushing to my temples. A memory flashed across
my mind of my foot stepping onto the ice of the Yalu River. I walked
calmly out of the apartment building, took the chip out of my cellphone,
and dropped it in a trash can.
Chapter 23
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