confide in and trust, someone who would understand why I’d behaved in
the way I had; who would tell me that it wasn’t
my fault, that she would
have done the same.
As if in answer to a prayer, fortune sent me one.
Her name was Ok-hee, and I’d known her briefly back in Shenyang. She
too had been a waitress, and belonged to the small circle of North Korean
friends I had started making. I had barely got to know her when the police
interrogated me. After that I had kept a low profile and shunned everyone,
especially North Koreans.
It was actually me who saw her first,
outside a cosmetics store in
Koreatown. She was extremely surprised to see me. She was a slim quiet
girl, with a charming habit of inclining her head and twirling her hair when
spoken to. Over a cup of bubble-milk tea she admitted to me that her ID
was a fake. Her greatest fear was that her poor Mandarin would let her
down and expose her. She too was fleeing the authorities in Shenyang.
Ok-hee would become a great friend to me in China.
Chapter 32
A connection to Hyesan
Not
long after meeting Ok-hee, I got a call out of the blue from Min-ho.
What he told me transformed my life.
I was doubly surprised to hear him, not only because I’d been losing
hope of ever speaking to my family again, but because I’d always thought
that I would be the one making contact. It hadn’t occurred to me that this
might be in his power, too. He was speaking from Mr Ahn’s
house in
Changbai.
After my initial elation, my spirits began to slide when he explained the
reason for the call. He and my mother had money problems, he said. The
cash I had given him in Changbai had been used up.
‘Used up?’ I was dumbfounded.
‘Yes. Will you send some more?’
I had given them 5,000 yuan. A farmer in China makes 2,000–3,000 yuan
a year. I figured the money would last them quite a while, even if they
didn’t earn anything themselves. After years in the Chinese workforce, I
had developed an emotional attachment to money.
My earnings were my
hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred. North
Koreans have no way to relate to this. In the outside world, they believe,
money is plentifully available to all. Min-ho seemed to think I just had to go
to a money shop and get more. There was no point telling him that I had
just
paid a great deal for my ID, that my rent was high, and that I had a
huge debt to repay after the disaster with the gang.
I sighed, and said: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
He was vague about where the money had gone. I guessed that my
mother must have had bribes to pay. It was only later that I found out that
she had been helping my uncles and aunts.
At
the end of the conversation, almost as an afterthought, he dropped
another bombshell. This piece of information changed everything for me.
‘Oh, and could you send me a cellphone?’
He said that people in the border area had started using cellphones to
make
calls to China, using the Chinese network. It was highly illegal, of
course.
This took a moment to sink in.
The next day I bought a Nokia and a chip and sent it, along with 1,000
yuan in cash, for Mr Ahn to send to Min-ho.
The first time I called the Nokia, Min-ho answered. Something like this
only happened in a happy dream.
He’s passing the phone to my mother.
‘Min-young?’ I hadn’t been called that name in a long time. ‘Is that you?’
I was hearing her voice, but it sounded strange and ethereal, as if she
were speaking from another world.
‘Omma,’ I said, using the Korean word for mother.
‘Yes?’
‘Is it you?’
Just as with Min-ho when I heard his voice on the phone, the suspicion
flitted across my mind that this wasn’t her, that it was some kind of trap.
‘Can you tell me what time of day it was when you last saw me?’
She laughed, and the laugh was warmly familiar.
‘You left the house just after dinner, at seven o’clock on the fourteenth of
December 1997. And you had those bloody fashion shoes on.’
Now I laughed. ‘How do you remember so exactly?’
‘How could I forget the night my little girl left me?’
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