|
I’ve made a terrible mistake.
The man continued. ‘Tell us the truth – right now. You won’t get into
trouble. We’ll let you go back to Shanghai.’ He paused to let this option
sink in.
‘I am telling the truth. My name’s Park Min-young. I’m willing to be
investigated.’
Even the truth sounded strange and dubious to me. I had not used that
name in more than a decade.
‘All right.’ The woman shook her head. ‘It’s your decision.’
I spent two hours being questioned alone by her in a windowless room,
and watching her taking notes. When I thought we’d finished, two other
men in suits and open-necked shirts arrived. They were older, one in his
forties; the other, with steel-grey hair, in his fifties. From the way she
greeted them, I understood that they were her superiors. Then she left. The
men started questioning me all over again, from the beginning. They also
didn’t believe I was North Korean. The older man had an aggressive edge to
his voice.
By this time I was tiring and getting hungry, and starting to lose the
thread of the questions.
The irony. In Shenyang, I’d had to convince suspicious police that I was
Chinese, not North Korean. Here, I was trying to do the opposite.
After two more hours they told me we were going to the NIS processing
centre in Seoul. They led me through a side exit to a waiting car and driver.
By now it was early evening and dark. I had been at the airport for five
hours. The vehicle was a gleaming civilian car that smelled new. I sat in the
back with the younger man. We drove past the terminal building and looped
around on a six-lane highway lit sodium amber by the streetlamps.
‘This is the way into Seoul,’ the younger man said. He was the nicer of
the officers who had questioned me. His steel-haired colleague in the front
said nothing.
I tried to assess my situation. I’m not in jail. They haven’t put me back on
the plane. That counted as progress. This thought was quickly superseded
by a less comforting one. What would my friends back home think if they
knew who I was with right now? To North Koreans, the Angibu, as they call
the NIS, was the sinister agency behind all road and rail disasters, building
collapses, faulty products, supply failures and unexplained fires. Many
people executed in North Korea, especially high-ranking cadres, are
accused of having aided the Angibu.
‘We’ve been busy,’ the man said. ‘This is our second trip to the airport
today. Just before you landed, 150 North Koreans arrived and are now
being processed.’
‘How many?’
‘One hundred and fifty. Each week we’re getting about seventy from
Thailand and about the same number from Mongolia and Cambodia.’
They were experiencing the biggest-ever surge of defectors, he said,
caused by a huge crackdown on illegals in China – part of a social clean-up
before the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
He asked me what I felt about the country I was now in, and started
giving me basic facts about life expectancy, healthcare, average income. It
sounded like a spiel he’d given many times. His aim was to puncture the
false beliefs learned from propaganda – that people here are impoverished
and persecuted, that the American soldiers stationed in Seoul gleefully kick
children and the handicapped. North Korean propaganda is so grotesquely
over the top that, in debunking it, the South Koreans have no need to
exaggerate. As long ago as the 1970s, when South Korea began rising
towards the major league of world economies, all it took for North Korean
defectors to unlearn decades of propaganda was a tour around a Hyundai
automobile production line, or the Lotte Department Store in Seoul. This
even worked with highly indoctrinated commandos captured after failed
secret missions to the South.
We were driving in fast rush-hour traffic along the Han River near
Yeoido, a high-rise business district; great work-hives coruscated with light.
I looked up and saw a vision of plated gold glass, which I recognized from
TV dramas.
‘The Sixty-three Building,’ the agent said. ‘A landmark. Sixty-three
floors. We don’t build them too high, or they’d be targets for a North
Korean attack.’
So much light. So much wealth.
All this had been going on while I was growing up, less than 300 miles
away to the north. I shook my head as the full realization of where I was
struck me. For a moment I felt so excited I could hardly breathe. I was on
the other side of my divided country. I was in the parallel Korea. It was vital
and real: compared with the sloth and gloom of the North, the energy and
light everywhere was astounding me.
We arrived at the monolithic processing centre of the NIS. Armed
sentries stood guard outside. The huge gate opened automatically without a
sound, and I felt my excitement wane. My ‘real investigation’, as the agents
put it, would soon begin.
Chapter 38
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
