A Thousand Miles to Freedom (8 page)

*   *   *

As soon as our guardian angel received my mom's consent, she set to work immediately. She made many calls on her cell phone. Sometimes, she spoke in Korean. When that was the case, I tried to guess what the conversation was about. More often, she spoke in Chinese and I couldn't understand what she was saying. She enthusiastically inquired about every potential suitor. While listening to her talk on the phone, I asked myself,
Is this really how she was going to find us a man?
I thought that she would ask friends, neighbors even. But she seemed instead to have some sort of a network, and a lot of experience as a matchmaker. Were there really that many Chinese men who were looking for North Korean wives?

That morning, she scurried around frantically and just a few hours later, her phone started ringing. Then it rang again. Everything seemed to be moving faster than we had expected. But our “generous savior” never told us any details of the phone calls.

The morning of the third day, two sinister-looking men with dark, sunburned skin appeared in the room where I was staying. One of them had a huge burn on his left temple, and his hair had stopped growing there.

They are both so hideous
, I thought in fear, when I saw them standing in front of our hostess in a corner of the kitchen.

I tried to listen to them discreetly, but to no avail. They were speaking in Chinese, and I couldn't understand a word they were saying.

A moment later, the uglier of the two took out a bundle of very dirty money, and gave twenty hundred-yuan bills to our hostess.

The woman came to fetch us and told us to pack our belongings and follow her.

“This man wants a son,” she explained to my mother.

I did not yet understand that we had just been sold for two thousand yuan.

 

9

Several Months Later

We never should have come to China. For three hours, my mother, Keumsun, and I had been walking through the darkness of the Chinese countryside looking for a bus stop. To flee … to leave this barbaric man who held us prisoner. Mom had decided to flee one night after a particularly nasty argument with her Chinese “husband.”

“I want her to give me a son,” he had told the woman who sold us to him. For several months, he harassed my mom in this pursuit.

That night, she just couldn't take it anymore.

“I'm too old to get pregnant now, let us go,” she begged him.

“I paid two thousand yuan for you, reimburse me then!” he hollered back at her.

*   *   *

From the very first day, I hated this man. He was more than forty years old, but I, a little girl, was already better educated than he was. He didn't even know how to write his own name. He just used an
X
as his signature.

I still remember very clearly the first day of our new life with this man. We had left our “savior” and headed toward unknown territory. Because our “savior” hadn't even bothered telling us which one of the two boorish men had bought us in the kitchen, it took a while to get used to the idea that this would be the new man in our lives, my new “father.” Our “savior” barely even said good-bye to us.

We left her house following the two men, who walked in front of us. We didn't exchange even one word. It was only when the three of us were sitting on a bus headed toward an unfamiliar destination, alone with one of the two men, that everything started to sink in. The other man was just a friend of his who had come to help him with the transaction.

My mom's new “husband” wasn't very tall, no doubt less than five foot four, with a protruding stomach mounted atop two tiny legs. He had a square face that was large and flat—there was nothing charming about him whatsoever. I got the feeling that he wasn't very confident in himself, or at least that he was a bit timid. He seemed to want to say something to me, but then changed his mind, as if he was incapable of communicating. But then again, we didn't know how to speak Chinese.

The bus shook back and forth as we rode in silence across the countryside before reaching a small town, where we disembarked. At that station, the man led us to another bus and then we took off again, still having no idea where we were headed. We were on the bus for nearly four hours. Finally, we reached Sukhyun-Jin, another small town in Jilin Province.

When we got there, we were in for quite the surprise: waiting for us there was a small, dirty ox pulling a rickety wagon. To my horror, I realized that we were deep in the Chinese countryside. And to think that the woman had promised my mom a well-established husband in the city.

We traveled at a turtle's pace along a muddy country road in this wretched vehicle, until we reached a scanty village called Yang Chang Chon. With our heads down, we moved down the main street and felt the curious eyes of the villagers glaring at us. I anxiously observed this new scenery, including the houses that were soon to become the scenery of my daily life.

On the other side of the village, the route went up a hill, and right as night was falling, the wagon finally stopped and we disembarked in front of a pitiful-looking farm: our new home. The farmhouse's roof was made of straw and the walls were made of wattle and daub planted atop gravel. It was already dark, and the weather was very gray that day, which only reinforced the negative feelings I already had about this place. Here I was, condemned to live in a slum. And to think that I had heard that China was a land of plenty. Even our apartment in Eundeok had been better than this.

*   *   *

Immediately, from the very first night, we understood that we were not welcome in this family, and that life was not going to be easy—far from the na
ï
ve images of comfort and security we'd originally had in mind. We learned that the man still lived with his old parents, whose word, according to Confucian tradition, was law in the household. The man was the third son in a peasant family of six children. His four brothers and his sister had left to go live in the big city, while he was still stuck at the farm. He had once been married, but his wife had fled the farm. He never told us why, but after seeing the way he treated us, I think I could venture a guess.

After arriving at the farm, we saw that my new “father” lived not only with his parents, but also with his nephew and niece. They were wearing dirty, tattered clothes, and the boy limped when he walked—adding all the more to the depressing atmosphere of the household.

The farmer's elderly mother was never fond of having an outsider as a daughter. Right away, she made it understood that we were merely tolerated in the household and that we had to obey everything she said. The first night, she made us sleep in the stable attached to the tiny house. Before going to bed, we were allowed to eat a greasy Chinese meal with the family. Silently, under the feeble lighting, I forced myself to hide my utter disgust at eating this fatty and indigestible food. Oh how much I missed Korean food, especially
kimchi
. Life here was miserable already.

*   *   *

The next day, our suspicions were confirmed: we were merely three bodies to toil away in the fields every day under the careful watch of the farmer's old mother. On the morning of the first day at the farm, we were already put to work, picking out weeds and planting rice, potatoes, and beans.

For the first few weeks, we tried to just go along with it, and we did the best we could in the fields. We were rather disappointed that we had ended up in such a depressing and backward area, but we didn't have any other options. It was the only way we had been able to improve our living conditions, the only way we could leave the world of begging and avoid getting arrested on the streets. And so we did our best to integrate ourselves into this family and to try to reach a mutual understanding between us and this man. At first, he tried to do the same. He tried to defend us against his irascible mother. We were allowed to move around on the farm, and the four of us could sleep together in one of the three rooms while the man's old parents occupied the room the farthest away. But whenever the man's brothers came back home, we had to return to the stable. Priority went to family, of which we were clearly not a part.

*   *   *

The house was dirty and dilapidated. There was a heating system that was a little like the
ondol
used in Korea but that used firewood instead—it was so archaic you would think it was from another century. We had to heat it up using the fire from the kitchen, the only source of heat in the house. And since the walls were dotted with holes that let in cold air from the outside, it was absolutely frigid during winter, a winter which, in this area in the northeast of China, was just as bad as our winters in North Korea. Snow didn't fall all that frequently, but when it did, the ground stayed white for weeks on end.

The old mother was clearly our enemy, and she started making more and more derogatory comments about us and imposed chores and punishments on us that were often absurd. For her, we were just slaves, and she treated us as if it was already an enormous honor for us to even live under the same roof as her. One day, she drew a line on the ground near the entrance of the house that we, the Koreans, were not allowed to cross. This ridiculous and arbitrary new rule meant that we had to detour around the building to the back whenever we wanted to go out. It was her way of making sure we understood our inferior status.

The man also started imposing more restrictions, quickly forgetting his earlier efforts to help us during the first few weeks. For example, one night, after a long day of hard work in the fields, he refused to let us turn on the TV to watch a show, claiming that it would drive up the electricity bill. Often, after dinner, we would try to assert ourselves and turn on this archaic TV anyway. It was our only time of rest and distraction from a long day of labor. And in response he would get up and turn it off.

“You're going to use up all the electricity if you watch it this much!” he would say without the smallest hint of irony.

After a few months, we started to learn a bit of Chinese, which let us respond to him tit for tat. But that also meant that we started having vicious arguments nearly every day, and that the atmosphere soon became unbearable.

Fortunately, my “stepfather”'s nephew and niece were nice to Keumsun and me. Despite the language barrier, we quickly became friends. First we started playing hide-and-seek on the esplanade in front of the farm. They taught me a Chinese game called
jianzi
, like Hacky Sack, that I really enjoyed. Using our feet, we juggled a small shuttlecock decorated with feathers. I played for hours on this muddy terrain with my friends, whenever I didn't have to work in the fields.

*   *   *

The farm was located on a promontory and we had an excellent view of the road down below. If a police car was coming from Yang Chang Chon, we could spot it from afar and neighbors would have enough time to warn us that it was coming. Indeed, everyone in the village knew where we came from and tried to protect us. As soon as a neighbor gave us warning, sometimes by telephone, we headed out the back of the farm and went to hide in the forest. Often, we would sleep in a cabin for a night or two before returning to the farm after everything settled. We were still, after all, living in China illegally.

Eventually, we had to face reality: our “benefactor,” the woman who'd seemed to help us so much when we first arrived in China, had been deceiving us the whole time. This “kind” and “benevolent” woman had not contacted us and had not asked us how we were doing after she pocketed the two thousand Chinese yuan. Not only did she make money behind our backs by selling us like we were commodities, but she didn't keep the promise she had made to us. She had promised my mom an official marriage, which would have allowed us to obtain residency permits in China. If we'd gotten them, my sister and I would have had legal protection here and been able to go to school, which was rather important for us at that age. We had not gone to school since our father died. In reality, this poor farmer had bought us illegally and had no intention of legitimizing the marriage. And he had good reason, because if he let it slip that we were North Koreans, we would immediately be arrested and sent back to our country according to the agreement signed between Beijing and Pyongyang. What's more, this gave him a way of blackmailing us and holding us prisoner. If we tried to leave, we risked being arrested at any moment. But if we'd had residency permits, we would have been able to escape without giving him what he wanted the most: a son.

From the beginning, he never stopped bothering my mom about this. Mom was so embarrassed. She was already in her forties. First she tried to tell him that she could no longer get pregnant. But her new “husband” was insistent; she had no choice but to try anyway, for the sake of her two daughters. She remembered the “agreement” the woman who sold us had mentioned: “This man wants a son.”

With no better option available, my mom told us that if she gave him what he wanted, the family would finally accept us and our material well-being would improve. Perhaps we would even have the chance to become legal residents. I didn't know what to think of it all.

The man was always telling my mother what benefits rearing a child would bring. His desire for a son did not stem from affection, but from material reasons. Poor, introverted, stuck on this remote farm, and abandoned by his previous wife, he had devised a plan to help him to reap the benefits of his parents' estate: if he succeeded in having a son, he would be able to snatch the family inheritance, in place of his older brothers. According to Chinese tradition, the inheritance goes to the eldest son of a family. This man was only the third son in his family, but only his younger brother had a son, who was a cripple at that. If my mother gave him the son he wanted, he hoped that his father would give him the family inheritance, especially the farm.